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8. THE EARTH IS BILLIONS OF YEARS OLD
CERTAIN THINGS ARE NOT KNOWABLE
We want to know certain things about new acquaintances. One of the first things we want to know is how old someone is. Things in our existence have beginnings, middles and ends. Because we have beginnings and middles and ends, we look for beginnings, middles and ends in everything around us.
Several thousand years ago, when there were no records, finding out how old someone was, when their beginning was, could present a problem. Without birth certificates, and without an accurate calendar, we could only estimate age. The four ages of man were the rough periods of a person's course through life, and putting a person in a particular age involved looking at the various characteristics and abilities, actions and behaviors that made that person up. Does the person crawl, is he vigorous, does he appear young, does he look wise, is he losing his facilities, is he wrinkled, does he ramble, these are characteristics that can be used as indicators of age. But without a record, we have no way of knowing the actual age.
Today, we keep fairly accurate records. As a result, although a lot of cemetery shoppers pick up aliases off tombstones, we can know with some degree of certainty how old someone is.
The age of a new acquaintance is, therefore, probably knowable. It is something that we can find out. It is a fact that can be established as well as actual facts in physical reality, facts such as a person's height, weight, eye or hair color, even sex.
What makes the question of age more ambiguous than actual facts is the actual fact that the person's age depends on something that happened in the past and the past no longer exists!
Because the past no longer exists, it is out of our reach and without accurate records or without records upon whose accuracy we can place reliance, we would have to fall back on estimating age from characteristics.
With records, age is knowable. Without records, age is approximately knowable.
Why is age approximately knowable without records?
Because we have a population that we can look at, we can see people in various stages of aging, we can look at records that provide the characteristics that occur throughout the aging process and we can then compare this information with the characteristics of the person whose age we are trying to estimate.
Age is approximately knowable without records because we have experience which we can apply to the facts to estimate the age.
But there are some things that are simply not knowable because we have no records, and we have no experience that provides characteristics with which comparisons can be made.
We deal with beginnings and ends because we have beginnings and ends, but we have no way of knowing what occurs before the beginning or after the end. We don't know where we were before we were born or where we go after we die because neither are current facts, and we have no experience we can use to bring to bear on estimating, on producing the knowing.
When we can't know something, then we simply can't know it.
As a result, we make things up!
There is nothing that distinguishes making up things that deal with nonexistence from making up things dealing with existence, reality, when the facts about that reality are out of reach, no longer exist.
However, we deal differently with knowing about the unknowable where there is no physical existence for the unknowable, questions of where we were before we were born or where we will go after we die, and where there is physical existence.
No one would seriously consider statements about an afterlife to be statements dealing with physical reality, and all would agree that such statements belong in the realm of the occult, are mystical in nature, provide the basis for religious systems.
But there are many questions about physical reality the answers to which we cannot know. We can't know what's in the center of the Earth or the sun because it is out of our reach. We can't know how far away a star is because we can't put a measuring rod against the distance. We can't know what makes up the atom because atoms make up our measuring rods. We can't know how big or how small the universe is or when it began or when it will end.
And we can't know how old the Earth is!
When we can't know something, we endanger ourselves if we pretend we can.
It is one thing to be mistaken about something, to think we know something when we don't. The results can be catastrophic, but at least the delusions that lead to our demise will be honest delusions, the result of simple ignorance.
It is quite another thing to pretend to know something that we cannot know.
The results are the same, of course, catastrophic, but in this case our demise can be attributable to simple stupidity.
Ignorance is unavoidable, stupidity inexcusable.
Claiming to know something that we can't know is shamanism and those that lay claim to unknowable knowledge are shamans.
Walking around with the delusion that committing suicide will transport us to a space ship in the tail of a comet is a private affair and believing that the sun moves around the Earth and the Earth is thus at the center of the universe is a mistake of fact born of ignorance and arrogance.
But arrogating knowledge where knowledge is clearly not possible is criminal, an offense against the paying public that puts faith in those it charges with obtaining actual answers about questions dealing with physical reality.
PRETENDING TO KNOW WHAT WE CAN'T KNOW
On the morning of May 1, 1902, in the city of St. Pierre, Island of Martinique in the West Indies, the rumbling continued apace. The night had seen a continuation of the bright flashes of lightening that had been turning the night sky into spectacular bursts of daylight for the past week. Puffs of smoke and ash continued to rise above Mount Pelée as they had done for the last twenty-three days.
The thirty thousand residents of St. Pierre went about their business as usual because those charged with knowing claimed that St. Pierre had always existed and it would always exist, and the activities being carried on by the neighboring volcano were of no concern because they had never been of concern before.
On the morning of May 2, 1902, the city of St. Pierre, Island of Martinique in the West Indies ceased to exist. The thirty thousand residents that had gone about their business on the morning of May 1 were now simply gone, no longer in existence.
The pictures we form of physical reality, the answers we make up for questions the answers to which we cannot know, dictate our survival. How we go about answering questions for which there are no answers has been the basis for some of the more profitable movies of the last decades. Jaws dealt with a known danger, a shark, that struck intermittently. A lone crusader tried to alert the townsfolk to a threat they were downplaying because it was against their commercial interests to recognize the threat. The shark in Jaws was the volcano in Dante's Peak.
How one accepts the danger may well determine whether one survives or not. We can move and nothing will happen, or we can move and something will happen, or we can stay in place and nothing will happen, or we can hit the jackpot, stay in place and be wiped out.
Personal decisions whether to stay in St. Pierre or swim with the sharks pale when the question becomes one of predicting catastrophes, where a hurricane will strike or when an earthquake will occur. Moving a million people away from a shore or out of a city could be expensive, and if nothing happens, embarrassing. As much as we want to believe that we can know where hurricanes will land or when earthquakes will strike, these things are unknowable. It's a thankless task to predict wrong, and irresistible not to predict at all.
But there is one area where predictions about what course events will take is not a prediction, but a fact in front of our faces.
The sun is burning furiously in the sky, and as it does so, it is getting measurably smaller. It is, of course, large enough to continue to get smaller for some time to come, but the fact is, whatever is fueling the sun is being used up as it is burning.
Next to the sun is a dried out hunk of rock, Mercury, that orbits in an elliptical orbit that causes it to alternately heat up and cool off as it approaches and moves away from the burning sun. Next to Mercury, moving in a nearly circular orbit, is Venus. Venus, however, doesn't heat up and cool off as it moves around the burning sun. It is hot as hell all by itself, hotter at its coolest place than the Earth is at its hottest.
The Earth, of course, is the ideal, with polar ice caps, toasty equatorial regions, and everything else in-between, but it's moon is as dead as Mercury. Because it is further from the sun, however, the moon is as cold as the night of space.
And the night of space is cold.
Very cold!
So it is only reasonable to come to the conclusion that the sun and the planets that orbit it, and the moons that orbit the planets formed at some time in the past hot, and that because they occupy cold, empty space, they have been cooling off ever since, with the sun, because of its large size, red hot, molten on the surface, with the matter that is burning not yet congealed enough to present a solid surface to the coldness of space, with Venus, much smaller, it's surface congealing, producing a haze of light elements that appear as clouds to buffer the still molten surface from the emptiness of space, with the Earth cooled off enough for the clouds of light elements to have recombined into water that can exist in pools on the cooled rock of the surface and provide the basis for life, and the moon, smaller still, too cold to support life or hold water to its surface.
While a planet losing its water opposes the concept of gravity as a property of mass and the idea that Venus is hot because of internal processes that dictate it be a late comer to the solar system opposes the concept of a solar system set in motion some time in the past by a historical force and maintained in that motion unchanged, undisturbed to the present day, the picture presented of planets formed hot and cooling down in the coldness of space is not only viable, it is inescapable. It's awfully hard to look at the sun and say that it isn't burning, that it isn't consuming what it is burning, growing cold as it does so, it's awfully hard to look at Venus and say that it isn't cooling but rather growing hot in its circular orbit because of sunlight, and it's darn near impossible to look at the moon and say it's not what it is, a hunk of cold rock.
So why do we look at the Earth like the St. Pierrens looked at their rumbling volcano, what was yesterday will be tomorrow, when we know that heat flows from hot objects when hot objects occupy cold places? How is it that we can maintain the absurdity that the moon and the Earth were formed out of a swirling mass of gas at the same time, and that the moon was formed cold and the Earth rapidly cooled down to its present temperature where it has remained ever since?
How can we not see a progression from the sun to the moon with the Earth at some point in-between?
We pretend to the knowledge of the Earth's age and condition during that age, that the Earth has maintained its temperature for some four billion years, because of a mistake in the concept of evolution, that evolution is Darwinian, it involves the mutation of one species to the next rather than the evolution of characteristics which can be transmitted for use as needed as species evolve to match the existing environment.
The idea that dinosaurs morphed into birds and as a result required millions and millions of years to lose the weight and gain the wings needed to soar through the air controlled how we made decisions, created processes and procedures which would make us believe we had answers to questions for which no answers were possible.
We have constructed a picture of our future on Earth, an endless sojourn on a planet that will never cool off, in fact a planet whose only danger is exactly the opposite, the danger that it will heat up and fry us all, in the same way that the Gilchrists construct the Nancy cartoons. In a Nancy cartoon, the last panel is drawn first and then all prior panels are drawn to give the final panel meaning.
In determining the unknowable age of the Earth, the final panel, a timeless past in which all forms of chance experimentation could bring forth complex life forms, is constructed, and then all prior panels, realistic estimates of the Earth's age made by Lord Kelvin based on its rate of cooling, the origin of life requiring some predecessor, if not an egg or seed, the invisible spore, mountain ranges accreted by magma buildup, an eon and more of Mount Pelées when seashells are found on Himalayan ridges and other mountain ranges which contain unweathered and therefore young peaks, sedimentary deposits containing an orderly sequence of fossil remains so that we can pretend to having an actual "record," a kind of cosmic courthouse containing species birth certificates, and radiometric dating, a process that produces a sort of replicating energy, radiation, that by continually heating up the cooling Earth, resets the atomic clock it purports to produce, are all drawn to support, to give meaning to the picture of species evolution presented in the final panel.
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ATTEMPTING TO KNOW THE UNKNOWABLE RESULTS IN BELIEF
The age of the Earth is a fact. The Earth is here, it exists, it had to come from somewhere, and it had to come from somewhere at a specific time and that time is in the past, so the age of the Earth is a fact.
It is just an unknowable fact.
Any explanation for an unknowable fact cannot itself be fact, it must forever be a product of the mind, a made up fantasy, something for which belief is accorded.
When we are dealing with beliefs, we are not dealing with reality. As a result, we tend to claim our beliefs facts and then undertake crusades to eradicate any opposing beliefs.
Speculations about the age of the Earth are so intertwined with religious beliefs that the controversies that surround the question will, in all probability, survive the twentieth century and plague the foreseeable future.
The best phrase with which to summarize the controversy, or at least its tone, is the assertion that the Earth is flat.
"Flatearther" was a term manufactured by Darwinists to avoid the religious issues inherent in opposing evolution.
No one at any point in the history of the planet ever made the claim that the Earth was flat!
Darwinian supporters accused their opponents of believing that the Earth was flat, implying that at some point in the past, when science was fantasy and people held beliefs not supported by fact, ignorant savages held the belief that the Earth was flat. Opponents of evolution are thus flatearthers, ignorant primitives. Taking any other tact would result in a challenge to the Church's teachings dealing with creation. If man was created by God, then he certainly didn't evolve from simpler life forms, in the words of the anti-Darwinists, apes.
Calling their opponents "Godlovers" didn't seem to have the necessary sting to it and involved a bit of danger, the least of which was public scorn, so the Darwinists created a belief that ignorant people believed at one time that the Earth was flat and that, by implication, also believed that God created man and that these flatearthers were not dealing with the facts of reality, the science that the Darwinists were making up to explain the origin of life on Earth.
In many respects, the argument goes to the very core of a science that claims that its beliefs are based on fact. All of Modern Science's claims, that gravity is a property of mass, that the Earth rotates as a result of angular momentum, that planetary orbiting is the result of the solar system condensing out of a swirling mass of gas, that the universe was created in a very large explosion, that light is a wave, electricity a moving charge and magnetism the result of molecular magnets, obtain their authority from the belief that they address the facts in reality because they purport to verify those facts by measurement as opposed to the religious creation myths, which claim their authority from revelation.
Actually, the difference is one of degree. Creation myths are designed to explain how things got the way they are, and scientific myths dealing with creation merely contain the added claim that the way things are have been verified by measurement. There is no way to measure the formation of the solar system, either as to how or when, and there is no way to measure how species evolved, so that any difference in explanation is only as valid as the name-calling opportunities presented to each, "Your mommy was an ape!" or "You're an ignorant flatearther!"
No matter who says what with how much authority, we're still dealing in beliefs, made-up stuff the validity of which will never be known because the facts they deal with, the source of current existence, no longer exist and are therefore unknowable.
CLOCKING THE AGE OF THE EARTH
The first modern attempt to determine the age of the Earth occurred in the seventeenth century, several centuries before Darwin. The bible starts off with a bunch of begats, allowing the construction of a genealogy of sorts all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. By putting an average life span to all of the begats, Bishop Ussher placed the date of creation on October 22, 4004 years before the birth of Christ.
This date is clearly based on religious authority. A hundred years before, Copernicus had published his observation that the Earth, rather than being the center of the universe, moved around the sun. When the Earth was the center of the universe, it didn't have to come from anywhere. But as people became accustomed to the idea that the Earth was like a rock hurtling around the sun, the question of where the rock came from, and when, came into play. Religious authority abhors unanswered questions (as does scientific authority) and when questions are asked, answers have to be generated, otherwise what kind of authority would it be? No one accords authority to institutions that go around saying, "I don't know."
Authority is accorded to anything that has the power to pretend authority!
Just as the flatearth argument allowed Darwinists to attack religious creation claims without mentioning God, so did the good Bishop's absurdly specific claim give Darwinists an endless opportunity to attack biblical creationism without mentioning the Bible. The world was still in the throws of updating its calendars to accommodate itself to errors in computation that had put it almost two weeks into the past so that the stupidity of even attempting to claim a specific date thousands of years in the past was a joke on its face.
Claiming the superiority of your own beliefs by denigrating the beliefs of your opponents, Bishop Ussher's claim is the opening gun professors use to teach evolution to this day, is certainly a noble undertaking of longstanding practice, but it adds not a whit to the validity of your own beliefs, and only a fool would believe that it does.
However, asserting that Modern Science is an intricate web of belief systems with no basis in reality other than the claim that the beliefs arise from precisely measuring reality invites the rejoinder that emphasizing the belief nature at the basis of Modern Science overlooks the way in which the probability of a conclusion supported by many interlocking and mutually reinforcing clues can be close to certainty, even if every clue by itself is less than definitive. Modern Science bases its authority on the overriding belief that the existence of many different strands of evidence can transform a hypothesis into a fact without regard to the validity of any particular piece of the evidence.
In other words, Modern Science overcomes the claim that it is based on belief by claiming that the careful construction of all panels of the comic strip turns the final panel into a fact!
THROWING OUT THE BABY WITH THE BATH WATER
Three specific belief systems mark recorded history in the western world. In the first, Aristotle set forth a comprehensive scheme for the existence of matter and motion. The central feature of that system was that the Earth was the center of the universe around which all objects in the heavens moved. The second belief system, Christianity, was sourced in the old testament creation myth and after a thousand years itself incorporated, or rather accommodated Aristotelian concepts of matter and motion into its creation myths.
When Copernicus described a solar system in which the Earth was not the center of creation, the Aristotelian idea that the Earth was the center of the universe was so tied up with the religious concept of man as the center of creation that to oppose one, the physical relationship, was to oppose the other, the ego based religious precept of man as central to the universe.
At the time, education was church based, Aristotelians were called Philosophers, and the entire universe was viewed through the lens of the church-based Aristotelian authority. Because the controversy over whether the sun went around the Earth or the Earth around the sun could not be settled by measurement, a scientific belief system arose as the third belief system, a system whose sole goal was to use physical measurements to replace the Aristotelian belief system incorporated into church teachings.
You don't throw out one part of a belief system and keep the other parts. The Church may well have had to accommodate Aristotle because physical reality was fact and many revelations did not address actual facts in physical reality, nor would it be desirable for them to do so where revelation opposed those physical facts, but the group that sought to destroy the old way was claiming only measurable fact to start with, was claiming that answers could be obtained without revelation, without subjective belief (such a claim itself being a belief).
As a result, anything the believers in an Earth centered universe believed in was as wrong as the belief in the Earth centered universe.
The facts set forth in the Bible were just as valid as the facts that led Bishop Ussher to come up with a precise October date for the day of creation.
They weren't!
Not only were the facts in the Bible not valid, they were a source of amusement, a subject for derision. What was in many cases historical record-keeping in biblical format was categorized as revelation and put in the dustbin for belief not worthy of scientific consideration.
One of the facts set forth in the Old Testament dealt with the Great Flood.
The flood story is not specific to western thought or the Old Testament. It is universal. Every religion and cultural tradition on the face of the planet has a flood story, with groups of people on every speck of land on the globe recounting tales of their past that includes the flood story. At last count, there have been over five hundred separate flood stories recorded, all essentially identical.
But for the western scientific belief system, the flood story was a part of the Bible and therefore not only myth, made up fantasy, but in addition, something that absolutely did not happen!
The flood was a catastrophe that happened suddenly, and in doing so, changed the face of the Earth and the nature of the life forms occupying it. Church-based Aristotelian precepts were not just wrong, they described the opposite of what occurred. If the Bible described a catastrophe, the catastrophe didn't just not happen, no catastrophe ever happened.
Thus, any idea that catastrophic events occurred in the Earth's past had to be thrown out with the idea that the sun went around the Earth. The young effort to determine how to view the Earth's history was treated like a Ming Dynasty courtesan's foot, bound and crippled, with the result as slavishly adored!
By rejecting a catastrophic view of the Earth's history because the biggest catastrophe possible, a worldwide deluge, was related in the Bible, the seekers of the new truth, the anti-Aristotelians, were left with the opposite of catastrophe, sudden change, uniformity, no change.
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MOUNTAIN RANGES AND LAYERS OF SEDIMENT
The evidence that mountain ranges were thrust up in catastrophic events litters the mountain ranges themselves, with sea level fossils littering mountain sides, remnants of tropical plants necklacing mountain peaks which are themselves unweathered and therefore of recent origin and the geologic structures themselves clearly the result of upthrust rather than accretion.
The evidence that mountains were built up gradually by magma extrusions is nonexistent. However, because magma comes out of volcanoes and builds up the sides of those volcanoes, it is conceivable that very big mountains could be built up by magma flows and therefore they were. In a modern version of the extrusion belief, instead of the magma pouring out of a hole in the ground, it lubricates the movement of giant plates which float around on the surface of the Earth, occasionally undercutting one another, pushing up mountain ranges in the process.
There is no evidence that plates are floating around on molten magma, but because it is possible that they could be, this is the explanation for mountains, with perhaps the exception of the Rocky Mountains, the Atlas Mountains, the Andes and chains in the Antarctic to name a few.
When these mountains in turn contain evidence that supports the biblical flood which could never have taken place because it is a religious myth, then immense, slow moving ice ages, acting over eons, were created, ice ages whose cause defies explanation, but which are needed simply to explain how giant boulders, hundreds, sometimes thousands of tons of solid rock called erratics because they are out of place, could be transported vast distances from their geographical sources, some found on ground higher than ice soars, others in the middles of desserts where no ice ever tread.
Without a catastrophic occurrence, the physical evidence that catastrophic acts had to have wrought has to be explained away by something else because the catastrophic acts could never have happened.
Better to have an unexplainable ice age than a biblically described event!
The basis for all of these self-delusions, these beliefs in things which don't exist, magma extruded mountain ranges, roaming continental plates, ice ages, is the need to know that which cannot be known, the age of the Earth.
Lyell observed in the mid-nineteenth century that layers of sediment laid down layers of rock one atop the other. This stratification meant that each layer represented a geologic era in the history of the Earth. Because some of these strata contained the remains of the life that existed when the strata was laid down, the strata could be used as a clock to gauge the age of the Earth and the order of development of life on the Earth.
There were two assumptions that had to be made if strata were going to be used to write the history of the Earth. The first was that the thickness of the strata could be converted into years, that the time each strata represented was knowable.
This, of course, was simple delusion.
The second assumption required to turn the observation of strata into a history book, a "record," the word chosen because it produces the illusion that beliefs are facts, was that the strata had to have been uniformly laid down over the entire face of the Earth throughout the eons. It wouldn't do for the English, in whose country the idea was hatched, to build one clock based on a reading of their strata, and the Americans to build another clock using the strata in North America. It was necessary for all strata to represent the same history no matter where on the face of the Earth the strata appeared.
This is a complex delusion indeed!
If the Earth had been mucked up by a bunch of catastrophes, if floods had poured throughout the land, mountain ranges had been thrust up here and there in response to earthshaking events or monumental earthquakes had mixed and mismatched the strata, then the clocking device of the strata would be useless in telling us that which we could not know.
As knowing is much more pleasant than not knowing, catastrophes had to be done away with. Because they were biblically excluded to start with, anything in the Bible was bunk, a doctrine could be created and believed in which excluded the possibility of catastrophes mucking up the stratigrapical time clock. To underline the need for absolute belief, unthinking acceptance by the faithful, the doctrine was given an extremely religious sounding name, uniformitarianism, the uncapitalized "u" identifying it as a nonreligious belief. This belief, that all geological phenomena are the result of gradual forces that have operated uniformly from the origin of the Earth to the present time, is sacrosanct today, surviving even the occasional dinosaur death-dealing asteroid.
EVOLUTION DICTATES THE CLOCK'S RATE
Attempts to come to grips with some sort of explanation for life on Earth that didn't include the active hand of a metaphysical creator had been swirling around for hundreds of years before Darwin came up with his narrative on the evolution of species.
Because Naturalists were Empiricists whose purpose was to use measurement systems to classify life, the various forms of life on Earth were in the process of being categorized, placed into neat compartments so that when people were talking about something, they knew what they were talking about. "Species" is the category defined by the ability to interbreed. Darwin's story dealt with the formation of life at the simplest level and its assumed evolution into more complex forms. Because interbreeding was a natural barrier to the transition of one species into the next, Darwin was concerned with the evolution of species.
Because species evolution is a formidable mental jump as well as an impossible physical transition, the "how" was left to chance, species thought to evolve even today from one to the next as a result of happenstance, with the species most suitable to its environment the species that dominate that environment.
There are more holes in Darwin's theory of evolution than there are interpretations of that theory, but its basic precept is that one species somehow becomes another species, retaining some of the characteristics of the prior species to be used in conjunction with other chance characteristics accidentally created and incorporated with the existing characteristics because the new configuration was found to be viable in the environment.
A dog changing into a horse or an ape changing into a man (there were no dinosaurs in Darwin's world) present formidable mental obstacles. There are certainly similarities, and today with our computer software, we can morph one into another with ridiculous ease, but to attempt on a mental level the physical processes involved in converting bones and organs, hair and teeth from one to the other is just too much to endure.
When something isn't endurable, the best thing to do is find something else that is endurable. Instead of concentrating on whether such a transformation could occur, it is easier to just assume it did and focus on something else, something like the time it took to occur.
After all, we are dealing with reality aren't we, there are dogs and horses, apes and men, we aren't making up anything here, just dealing with how the facts got the way they are. Why bother trying to paint a moving picture of the transformation when we can just make up endless time, barely conceivable itself, but more conceivable than the transformation, and then say that the transformation occurred in endless time because endless time accommodates all chances?
Today, evolution from one species to the next is taken as proven fact. When anyone questions the existence of evolution, they are charged with being modern-day flatearthers, Creationists, and then the argument is couched in terms of bare religious belief or observable measurable facts. The observable measurable facts are embodied in recording the "evolution" of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands during periods of drought and plentiful rainfall. Because of the type of food that survives under each condition, the environment either favors long-beaked or short-beaked finches, starving out the unfavored finches in the process.
But simply observing that one finch thrives on one set of environmental conditions while another survives during the opposite set of environmental conditions does not say anything about dinosaurs evolving into turkeys.
Why not consider evolution a process in which characteristics were evolved and encoded and thus available to all subsequent life forms to express as needed so that new species evolve by strategies which utilize combinations of superseded, existing and new characteristics as the environment dictates?
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LIFE AS A CHANCE OCCURRENCE
With the discovery that boundary elements, elements at the upper range of existence, produce radiation as they break down in the given environment, and the discovery that radiation could, like the sun's rays on exposed skin, produce changes in living cells, the concept grew up that novel characteristics are the result of chance mutations resulting from exposure to radiation.
The notion that evolutionary mutation results from exposure to radiation conforms to the Darwinian need for happenstance, but why not take the simple position that life comes into existence where conditions are suitable for its existence and that characteristics do the same?
After all, life forms all around us. Just forget to put something in the refrigerator and it grows all sorts of life.
Why is there a need for chance evolution when evidence abounds that life rapidly adapts to the conditions in the environment, the short-beak, long-beak observation used erroneously to claim proof for species evolution?
Because the spontaneous generation of life smacks of biblical creationism and therefore its proposition can never be empirically supported!
As a result, life comes from spores. In fact, all life that does not come from eggs or seeds comes from spores.
What are spores?
Spores are what all life comes from that doesn't come from seeds or eggs!
A century ago, attempts were made to prove that matter would give rise to life by simple exposure to air. Sterilized matter was placed in a vacuum and observed to be dead when no life grew. When air was introduced, however, life grew in the form of mold.
Pasteur, an empirically subjective experimenter, didn't believe that life could form as a result of the exposure of lifeless matter to air and used his authority to label any experiment that was designed to demonstrate life arising from air alone the result of incompetence or fraud, the scientific terms used by Empirical Science to control the acceptability of experimental results that disagree with desired outcomes.
For instance, hay could be boiled lifeless, placed in a sealed vacuum container, and no mold would grow. Introduce purified air, however, and mold would grow.
Pasteur claimed the purified air wasn't purified at all, but contained undetectable spores of the mold.
Because mold grew with the introduction of air, the correct procedure would have been to have the person that claimed that life couldn't arise from the interaction of dead matter and air, Pasteur, prove it by placing the matter giving rise to life in air under circumstances that no life would result.
How we phrase our questions, and the evidence we demand as answers, fashions our ignorance!
It was not possible to introduce air into a lifeless flask without producing life a century ago and it is not possible to do so today.
But because it had been subjectively decided that life could not arise spontaneously as a result of the electrical interaction between the surface atoms of the matter and the atoms that made up the air (indeed, the concept of the atom had not been thought of when this conclusion was reached), it was only necessary to make the claim that invisible, undetectable spores existed in any air that could possibly be pumped into the environment containing the lifeless matter.
When proof of the spore's existence was demanded, the fact that air brought life to lifeless matter was used as proof for the existence of the spores in the air!
Today, the claim is made that spores exist under all conditions, and that this constitutes proof that life does not arise currently, but had to arise at some point in the past purely by accident. Any application of any air to lifeless matter will result in life because all air carries spores. This has given rise to the bird poop and wafting winds biology of Modern Science and means that if life didn't develop on this planet, it developed somewhere else the way it would have developed on this planet and was empirically transported here by the comets that we see as snowballs, so it's acceptable to conclude that life developed on Earth by accident.
And it also means that the only way that a characteristic can develop is by the chance modification of an existing characteristic.
WHY CHOSE THE ACCIDENTAL PRODUCTION OF LIFE OVER DEMONSTRABLE SPONTANEOUS GENERATION?
The two experiments that show the spontaneous generation of life, Pouchet's experiment showing air bringing life to lifeless matter and the Miller-Urey sparking of chemically rich clouds with electrical discharges, are both scientific in the empirical sense and repeatable.
Why not just accept them and shorten the time needed for evolution?
After all, if matter forms around electrical flows or as a result of differentials in electrical potentials, then animate matter could easily produce characteristics to deal with new environmental situations and encode those characteristics into genes which could then become a part of the universal gene pool of life on a particular planet.
The conceptual difference is not that great, a gene that came into existence God knows how (the Darwinian point of view as opposed to the Creationist's point of view, a gene God brought into existence) compared with a characteristic, the ability to organize atoms into shells, or antennae, or eyes or paddles, that is developed in response to the need to survive within the environment, and which is encoded in a gene that is passed on to all subsequent life.
Under the former, there is no explanation for the source of life, no clear picture how one species could evolve into the next, and the need for vast amounts of time for what cannot be visualized to occur. Under the latter there is a clear explanation for the source of life, a clear picture of how species can evolve from one to another, they don't, new species just chose from the panoply of characteristics available in the gene pool to put together an organism that matches the environment, and instead of inconceivable time periods, time is reduced to the time it takes for a frankfurter to become a stick of mold.
What committed the answer to the endless eons?
THE REAL BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF EVOLUTION WASN'T AGAINST THE FLATEARTHERS, THE RELIGIOUS OPPOSITION, IT WAS AGAINST THE PRACTICAL MEN OF SCIENCE, PRAGMATIC NATURALISTS
There was more than sufficient evidence around the globe that something on the nature of a flood had occurred and destroyed much of the life that had gone before, wiping out prior civilizations for which only remnants remained. Interpreting the evidence from such a violent viewpoint, however, would eliminate the ability to determine the history of the Earth by the fossils found in sedimentary layers, and in turn determine the age of the sedimentary layers by the fossils embedded in them, the endless chicken and egg dance that is the science of stratigraphy.
But there was a bigger obstacle to overcome than simply burying the islands of dead carcasses and tropical plants found embedded in arctic ice sheets, a greater delusion to attempt than merely ignoring the Pacific ports located fathoms beneath the sea and the petrified forests buried beneath mountains of sediment and a bolder challenge than making up idiot explanations for the vast beds of jumbled vegetation fossilized into coal fields.
The Earth was sitting in Newtonian dictated empty space, empty space was cold, laws dealing with thermodynamics required that heat flow from hot to cold, and thus, with the Earth being of a certain temperature, a reasonable estimate as to age could be made by computing how hot it possibly could have been and how long it would have taken to cool off to the point that it currently was.
Remember that evolution, like sociology today, was a nonmeasurable discipline attempting to gain influence in a world of theorists who happily deluded themselves and everyone else that measurements could prove beliefs to be fact.
As early as the eighteenth century, Buffon heated iron balls and then observed the time that it took for them to cool. Using simple comparisons of the amount of matter per volume, the uniform distribution of matter by size that Newton used in his failed attempt to prove that the attractive force was proportional to, and therefore a property of matter, he came to the conclusion that the Earth could not be older than a million years.
Something that is heated above the environment cools at a rate that is proportional to its temperature differential. A white hot ingot will cool rapidly as it emerges from the smelter, but as it cools, its rate of cooling slows. It will stay warm longer than it took for it to cool from its hottest temperature to become warm.
The chart the temperature drop produces is similar to the chart computing ten half-lives produces, the half-lives being the time it takes for half the atoms of a radioactive element to decay into an isotope. The first half-life changes half of all the atoms so the drop for the first period is sharp. The second half-life only changes one quarter of the original atoms, so the rate of drop from element to isotope starts to flatten out, with the next one eighth flattening the rate curve still further. By the time the tenth half-life is reached, the number of radioactive atoms left is approaching one percent, and the decay process, like the cooling of the warm ingot, is fairly steady.
Of course, the half-life of a radioactive element is a concept created by assuming that each radioactive emission results in an isotope conversion, an isotope itself being a concept, that the conversions are random, and that the laws of statistics can be made to apply to atoms, the atom itself being but a concept.
Buffon predated Darwin, but in the middle of the eighteenth century, the concept of evolution, and its concomitant time commitment, had already been well established. When Lord Kelvin approached the subject after Darwin had become controversial, his estimate of how long it would take for the Earth to cool to its present state was considerably lengthened, coming out at a hundred million years.
Millions of years, however, even a hundred of them, are something that people can comprehend, and when dealing with facts which cannot be known, it doesn't further the cause of obfuscation to deal with something that is even remotely understandable. When we pretend we know something, it is best that what we know is absolutely beyond the range of comprehension, and thus billions is a much better time frame to bandy about than millions. After all, the common is invisible while what is obscure, beyond the range of comprehension, inscrutable, invites interest and attention. This strategy is found throughout Empirical Science when the unmeasurable is claimed measured, billions of stars in billions of galaxies which are billions of miles away which were formed billions of years ago. The only place Empirical Science scores a direct hit with billions is in describing how many conceptual atoms make up a speck of matter, but then it goes on to defy reason by claiming to know exactly how many protons and nonexistent neutrons are in the center of the conceptual atom because it has to know what it cannot know, the rate at which the nonexistent neutrons have departed to produce the conceptual isotope used to measure the half-life of elements.
If Lord Kelvin's estimate was accepted, if he was correct, and in an empirical world it was hard to say he wasn't, then the Darwinian goose was just a goose and not a goose with dinosaur ancestors.
The argument therefore crystallized around saving Darwinian species evolution against physical proof that the Earth wasn't old enough for the endless time needed for species evolution.
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RUTHERFORD'S RADIOACTIVITY SAVES THE DARWINIAN DAY
It is difficult to discern the hasty assumptions that, because of the rapid discoveries surrounding the behavior of the boundary elements such as uranium, quickly became fact and as fact dictated our understanding of the nature of matter. The watershed assumption was the creation of the neutron out of the misapplication of Newton's Third Law of Motion to subatomic particles and its subsequent use to obscure comprehension of the nature of the atom. The whole series of discoveries was topped off by the production and use of the misnamed atomic and hydrogen bombs, triumphs of the effectiveness of trial and error exploration into the workability of physical reality but quite unrelated to the concepts that went into their production.
The big bang produced by these compression devices has been universally used as proof that the silly concepts about radioactivity created on the fly while facts were being rapidly uncovered are basic laws of the universe never to be tampered with by the mind of man that made them up.
The basic principle of radioactivity is that the more active the "radio", the shorter the half-life of the element producing the radioactivity. "Radio" is short for radiant energy, and radiant energy is any energy that radiates out in rays. Heat is radiant energy, and heat is measurable by putting your hand in front of a fire. But heat is an imponderable. According to Modern Science, heat doesn't exist between its source and its effect, so it can be distinguished from the type of radiant energy produced by radioactive elements, or elements that have been made active, activated by some sort of bombardment. Radioactive elements produce measurable rays.
For purposes of this particular panel of the evolutionary cartoon, however, radioactivity produces the imponderable, heat.
Now, if the Earth had radioactive elements down there somewhere beneath the surface producing heat, then Lord Kelvin's clock would never run out because the heat that would be lost to space was not being lost to space, it was being replenished by the heat produced by the radioactivity of the elements inside the Earth.
This sort of hazy thinking, that the Earth is not losing heat to space because it is being kept warm by its internal heat which is produced by radioactive elements beneath its surface mirrors the understanding of heat, which is an imponderable and doesn't exist between its source and its effect, there being no effect of the Earth's heat in space, and of radiation, which is heat made ponderable by clicks in detectors such as Geiger Counters.
THE BILLIONS OF YEARS IS IN THE CLICKS
When matter was found to emit something other than heat, the emissions were measured as scintillations, little sparks of light, which, strangely enough Modern Science also considers an imponderable which doesn't exist between its source and its effect. These scintillations were produced when the radioactive rays or particles came in contact with a detector, usually zinc sulfide painted on a glass slide.
Much of our measurements involving subatomic size and amount, and thus our knowledge of the nature of subatomic particles, is the result of people sitting in darkened rooms counting these little scintillations and noting their brightness, thus marking the subjective nature of Empirical Science.
Geiger found a way to electronically monitor the scintillations, creating a circuit the rays or particles produced which was connected to a noise maker, the click, click, click of a Geiger counter, and which can, being electronic, be monitored by all of the marvelous computer driven devices we produce today.
Fermi found that nonradioactive elements could be activated. Bathing nonemitting aluminum in beryllium emissions would result in radioactive aluminum. The activation, however, was only temporary.
Not surprisingly, different elements were found to have different lifetimes when activated, giving rise to Nobel attempts to integrate radioactivity into the Periodic Table which organizes elements by weight and electrical property. To accomplish this, artificially activated elements needed some sort of measuring rod to determine their ability to become radioactive. The 2.3 activated life of silver was chosen.
The life of an activated element, however, could not be used as a measuring rod because it could not be applied to elements which were found in nature to be radioactive. There was no way to measure the actual life of naturally radioactive boundary elements.
But because activation was considered to be a product of neutron capture, and neutrons had weight, neutron capture would increase an element's weight, and because radiation was considered the opposite, the loss of neutrons, and because weight was, as a result of Newtonian mistakes inextricably confused with mass, radioactivity was thought to involve the loss of mass which meant that as radioactive elements emitted their radiation, they lost mass and became isotopes.
Thus, a radioactive element was made up of atoms which were being converted to the atom's isotope. Because it was unknown which atoms were being converted to an isotope at any one time, the process could be described with the mathematics of statistics in which a certain percentage of the atoms lost their radioactivity in any given period.
The period used was the half-life of the element, the period during which one half of the atoms in the element could be expected to convert from the atom to an isotopic atom as a result of emitting radiation.
This led to the basic law of radiation, the more active the radiation, the shorter the half-life, which parallels the white hot ingot, the hotter the thing is, the more rapidly it cools off.
In what is one of the most ingenious illusions in Empirical Science, the mathematical formula devised to statistically compare the artificial activation of elements was then applied to nonactivated boundary elements to determine how long they would have been radioactive had they started out with a full activated life.
The heaviest elements in nature, those at the upper boundary of existence, survive because they are electrically balanced in combinations with other, lighter and therefore more stable, elements. They do not emit radiation. Isolate these heavier elements, however, and they evidence a mild radioactivity. Many nonradioactive elements can be made radioactive for short periods. The more radioactive an activated element is, the shorter the artificial activation and the shorter the element's half-life. Kick a rock loose from its pitchblende and find it to be mildly radioactive. Apply the measuring rod created to compare artificially activated elements and what do we get?
An extraordinarily long half-life!
The Darwinists needed eons of time to explain species evolution, but physical science showed that the Earth didn't have eons of time, it would have cooled off long before incomprehensible species evolution could have occurred. But wait, it did have eons of time because the Earth's heat was constantly being replenished by radioactive heat. And those eons could be demonstrated by taking a rock on the surface of the Earth that is mildly radioactive, that supposedly has a high proportion of isotopic atoms, and then computing backwards to determine the age of the Earth, which fortunately turned out to be the half-life of the barely radioactive boundary element found in the rock, four and a half billions of years.
This is sort of like coming across an ingot, processing it so that it becomes a billionth of a degree warmer than its environment and then using its rate of cooling to compute when it was forged.
But more silly, the very radioactive heat that the Darwinists used to keep the Earth warm for the billions of years needed for species evolution would also be the same radioactive heat that continually reactivated the boundary element used to put the figure billions to those years, destroying radiometric dating as a clock!
The radioactive Earth is great when the cartoon panel has to demonstrate why the Earth hasn't cooled off in the cold of space but has to be discarded when the cartoon has to use radioactive elements on the surface of that continually radioactively reheated Earth to prove how long the Earth has existed because radioactive heat resets the radioactive clock by reducing the proportion of isotopic atoms.
In short, if the radioactive heat used to warm the Earth were factored into the radioactive clock, the Earth's age would be back to somewhere around Buffon's million years.
When two panels of the cartoon are inconsistent, the Empirical Rule is to focus on only one panel at a time!
But then radioactivity is so useful, useful being the Empirical measure for maintaining fantasies. It's rays provide the chance mutations that drive evolution, its heat gives these chance mutations the time to produce species evolution and the isotopes it produces configure the clock that cloaks the whole process with an appearance of unassailability.
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THE MORE PROOF IS LACKING, THE MORE PROOF THERE IS
The age of the Earth is unknowable. When something is unknowable, there is no amount of proof that can be generated to demonstrate it.
There is, therefore, no proof that the Earth is older than a million years, let alone billions of years old. In fact, Buffon's experiments are probably closer to the truth than Lord Kelvin's Darwinian influenced estimates which, under the glare of reality, he quickly reduced by three quarters.
There is no proof for the proposition that the Earth has been the same temperature since its inception. In fact, the proof is quite the contrary. Things in physical reality cool off to the temperature of their environment, and the environment that the Earth occupies does not have temperature, temperature being a measure of activity and space being empty. If radioactive elements kept planets warm, the moon would shine when it wasn't full.
There is no proof that the history of the Earth is governed by uniformitarianism, the lack of action other than imperceptible action over long periods of time. In fact, the evidence is quite the contrary, with Earthquakes and volcanoes changing the geography of the Earth overnight even today. Given the fact that heat drives geographical changes, and in more ways than presently suspected, a hotter Earth meant a more violent geographical landscape, a landscape which could see the formation of mountain ranges as rapidly as television crews see the collapse of California freeways today.
There is no proof for a worldwide sedimentary build-up that would produce a uniform dating system. In fact, the evidence is quite the contrary, with sedimentary build-up being what it is, the result of local conditions. The historical "record" of the Siberian tundra is not writ large under a backward barbecue in Queens.
There is no proof that life came into existence accidentally. In fact, evidence is quite the contrary, with Pouchet's experiment consistently showing lifeless matter giving rise to life with the introduction of common air. Because we make up spores, then associate those spores as the source of bacteria and viruses, fungi and mold, then claim that because we find viruses and bacteria, fungi and mold under all conceivable environmental circumstances, the spores that cause them, spores we have made up because we have assumed that the viruses and bacteria, fungi and mold cannot come into existence spontaneously, exist in all conceivable environmental circumstances and thus air can never be provided the dead matter without the conceptual spores that give rise to the viruses and bacteria, fungi and mold doesn't change the reality that life comes into existence daily all around (and in) us.
There is no proof that species evolve one to the next, and in fact, the evidence is quite the contrary, with new species appearing daily. Using the word "mutated" to describe elementary life forms that evolve to meet new environment conditions, the actual proof of evolution, in place of evolution because we believe that evolution only occurs over eons begs the question. Life is the organization of atoms and molecules of atoms around electrical flows, and when the environment permits electrical flows around which atoms and molecules of atoms can organize, those atoms and molecules of atoms will organize immediately, and continue to organize to take advantage of all subsequent electrical flows generated either by the environment, or by the organized atoms and molecules of atoms in the environment. Life forms rapidly and completely, produces advantageous characteristics, encodes those characteristics in genes, and, when it become possible to replicate, passes those genes forward to all subsequent life forms to use or not use as the environmental needs dictate. The more complex the life is, the more strategies it can bring to bear in overcoming environmental obstacles and the faster it will evolve new characteristics.
And the proof for radiometric dating?
Radioactive elements have to be extracted from a material such as pitchblende. Radiometric dating assumes that the elements have been active while they are in molecular balance with the elements that make up the pitchblende. Zinc has a melting point of 420C, but when it is placed in molecular balance with copper, the resulting brass has a melting point of around 1050C. Saying that a radioactive element found in molecular balance with pitchblende has been radioactive since the pitchblende was formed is similar to saying that the zinc in brass begins to melt at 420C even though the brass itself continues intact. Add this to the absurd conclusion that radioactive elements beneath the Earth's surface are continually reheating the surface of the Earth, but are not affecting the radioactive elements used to date the surface of that Earth, and you have what one would expect from a belief system that actually believes that everything in the universe is going in straight lines.
The litany of Sagan, the most famous delusionist of Empirical Science, was that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Empirical Science requires that claims at least be demonstrated. When the Empirical Scientist produces the lab notes that show the half-life of Uranium-238 turned out to be demonstrated at 4.5 billion years, then that claim can be accepted as fact. Until then, it is merely a fantasy created to fill in the penultimate panel in a totally absurd mental cartoon.
Radiometric dating dates our beliefs, not the age of the Earth. And that is the most important test of its validity, because it integrates itself into a tapestry of fantasies that, taken together, become unassailable. After all, the basis of Modern Science is the probability that a conclusion supported by many interlocking and mutually reinforcing clues can be close to certainty, even if every clue by itself is less than definitive, leading Modern Science to its overriding belief that the existence of many different strands of otherwise unsupported evidence can transform a belief into a fact.
The more individual fantasies fail support, the greater the validity of the overriding belief giving rise to those fantasies!
What we want to believe is what we believe to be fact because we want to believe in an incomprehensible species evolution, the incomprehensible time it took to produce it, because we want to believe in a uniform environment stretching back into the unimaginable past and therefore into the unimaginable future, safety for ourselves and our progeny.
Above all, we want to return to our ego based religious precept of man as central to the universe.
It may be empirically measurable that we are not at the center of the universe, but we can produce a belief system that is just as good, that has us alone in the universe, an accident of chance unlikely to have ever been duplicated and unlikely to occur ever again.
After all, being alone and being unique is just as good as being at the center.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF A BILLIONS YEAR OLD EARTH
When facts are unknowable, how we phase our questions and what we demand as proof will determine what we end up knowing.
We are literally between heaven and hell, and neither appear to be desirable. If we look at the surface of Venus, we can visualize life forming in forming puddles of water as the planet cools much as it had to have once formed on the surface of the cooling Earth.
But if life comes into existence when conditions in the environment permit its existence, then the Creator has to be pushed back to the recesses of the universe, and with Him, our uniqueness, our aloneness, our centrality!
On the other hand, looking to the heavens, we see the moon, a dead cold rock. If we believe that the Earth is cooling off, that it was once hot like Venus, and perhaps even a miniature sun, then in staring at the moon we are staring the fate of the Earth, and our own fate, in the face.
Reality is difficult to perceive when viewed through our desire for something more than reality.
As a result, we phrase our questions and demand our proof as they relate to what cannot be known, and do so in the name of asking questions about objective reality that are not capable of being answered. We ask and answer questions of origin and end, of how large and how small, and in answering those questions, limit our knowledge about the questions of obvious reality, questions of what makes objects fall, what makes planets rotate and orbit, what is light and electricity and magnetism.
We assume away questions dealing with reality, claiming gravity to be a property like color, motion in space to be historical, light and heat imponderables that have no existence, electricity a moving charge and magnetism the product of molecular magnets.
By busying ourselves answering questions the answers to which are unknowable, we give ourselves the appearance of having answers when we know nothing about the matters that are absolutely essential to our survival and for which questions are answerable, movement and force.
Thinking that we are unique, that we have taken billions of years to get to where we are, we think we will be here for billions of years more so long as we don't shit in the drinking water, and we lose sight totally of the fact that the universe grinds on regardless of how we delude ourselves.
If we occupy ourselves with our own little ant hill and never concern ourselves with the possibility of surviving beyond it, we will never evolve the characteristics that will allow us to survive beyond it and will simply grow cold when it grows cold and die.
Copyright 1997 Peter Bros
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