(especially thinking, conscious beings)
By Dr. A. E. Wilder Smith
Only the contents of the Preface and Chapter IV are included here.
Preface...................................................1 Chapter I The Scientific Plausibility of a Naturalistic Approach To Life's Origin.................................5 Fox And Miller..........................................5 The Origin Of All Machines .............................6 The Von Neumann Machine ................................7 Infomnation Is Required To Instruct All Machine Construction....................................8 Spontaneous Generation: A Philosophy - Not A Science............................8 For Biogenesis Optical Purity Is Mandatory .............9 The Importance Of Teleonomy ............................9 The Second Law Of Thermodynamics ......................10 The DNA Molecule ......................................10 The Nature And Significance Of Optical Activity And Molecular Asymmetry ......................11 The Oxford Union Debate And The Juelich (Germany) Symposium ...........................19 The Science Of Chernistry Denies ......................23 Entropy Gradients......................................23 The DNA Three - Dimensional Information ..............25 Actual Information Mandatory For......................26 The Claude Shannon Type Of Information.................27 Louis Pasteur..........................................27 Arthur Komberg And Sol Spiegelman .....................28 The Grand Problem Of Biogenesis Today .................31 Origin Of Actual Information ..........................32 Chapter II The Nature Of Information ................................35 I) The History and Nature of ..........................35 An Alternative In Information Theory - ................39 The Binary Digit.......................................40 Words, Letters, Sequences and Meaning..................40 An Example ............................................41 The Work Of Professor Werner Gitt .....................45 Professor Gitt Continues...............................47 Actual and Potential Information-......................52 Fox And Miller's Philosophy Summed Up .................54 The Role of the Cerebrum in the Production of Actual Conceptual Information ......................61 The Possibility Of A Universal Think-Tank? ............63 Chapter III The Space-Time Continuum.................................67 b) The Nature of the Space-Time Dimension..............69 Multidimensional Reality...............................71 New Dimensions in Space, Time and Space-Time...........72 Views On The Nature Of Time (Leibnitz).................73 Views On The Nature Of Time (Sir Isaac Newton) ........74 The Nature of Thought and Computers....................75 Jacques Monod's Materialism............................77 The Psychospace of the Mind and its Conditioning ......78 The Substance of Thought...............................79 The Nature of the Psychospace..........................80 The Time Dimension is Not Creative ....................80 Chapter IV The Theoretical And Experimental Basis Of Geological And Evolutionary Dating......................85 Creation and Measuring the Time Dimension.............85 Long Term Dating Methods .............................88 Experiments With Long Term Dating Calibration In Iceland ...............................90 No Uncalibrated Long Term Radiometric Dating Method To Be Taken Seriously .........................91 The C 14 Method Of Dating.............................94 The Lead Isotope Method of Dating.....................94 Chapter V Some Recent Fossil Evidence.............................97 1) Fresh Hadrosaur Fossils in Alaska .................97 Comment on Basinger's Above Statements...............104 Some of the Costs of the Darwinian Theory to the Taxpayer.............................................107 Addendum.............................................110 Mirror Images and Entropy Status.....................111 Enzymes, the basis of the biological procurement of metabolic energy .....................112
By the time the average child has completed the school system and by the time the average undergraduate has completed college or university he feels himself sure of the following five "scientific" facts:
The following treatise examines in detail the above five points in the next five chapters. It shows that not one of their concepts is founded on science carried out according to the well known rules of scientific procedure in the laboratory today. If the scientist looks really carefully into the methods used to establish the five points mentioned above he will find, as we show in the following text, that even the old age of the earth (billions of years) and the universe rests upon excellent mathematics but which is unfortunately for mainstream biology completely erroneously applied.
To be sure of treating the subject of biogenesis, time and evolution effectively the author has had to look into such subjects as the nature of time, the nature of optical asymmetry in chemistry, the measuring techniques of dating and certain recent fossil finds which are not yet generally known, but which bear on the subject of this book.
The radiometric instrumentation used for calculating the age of the earth in billions of years is known to be completely uncalibrated and certainly not an established "fact" of modern science but an established cause of error. The use of uncalibrated experimental tools has always been a cardinal error of all really scientific method.
The reason why Darwin and so many other scientists lost their faith in their earlier joyous specifically, Christian convictions, lies neither in the facts of Genesis nor in the creation account being erroneous but in the fact that science has often thought too superficially about its experimental methods and has therefore drawn erroneous conclusions from them.
The following treatise examines the above 5 points critically. All the author requests of his readers is a fair unbiased but cold examination of what experimental science has to say today on matters which bear as a whole on the biblical testimony in the laboratory.
The Theoretical And Experimental Basis Of Geological And Evolutionary Dating
One finds on looking through popular magazines and geological text books that the age of the universe and the earth is conceived of in millions if not billions of years. Although perhaps a majority of conservative scientists believe that the dimensions of time and matter are both created dimensions the logical conclusion of this conviction is scarcely ever followed, namely that, if the time dimension is an ex nihilo created dimension, then before that dimension came to be created, there could be no time, that is no age to measure. Our minds are built to work mainly in the time dimension and cannot function if there is no time in which to work.
Among the rather complex consequences of the Evolution/Creation debate of recent years is the emergence of the fact that few students seem to be able to grasp the huge consequences of the fact that a real creative act would have on the dating methods used by science. To determine the age of the universe and the time spans available for the so called evolution of life from any primeval slime, radiometric methods (some of which are listed below) are used.
To expose the theoretical and practical difficulties in dating methods; which would occur if a creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing) has ever taken place in past history, the following examination question was once set in a general knowledge test at one of the senior state universities in the Middle West.
The examination question was couched in the following terms: The radiometric dating of radioactive ores. Examiners had often noticed in interviewing students that they had often swallowed whole aspects of radioactive dating methods but had never thought them through maturely. Therefore it was thought advisable to put some simple questions in this area in the general knowledge tests which all students had to undergo. As coming academically trained persons it was thought that an examination question on this general subject would induce more mature thought on the subject.
The examiner retired to the laboratory balance room an hour or so before the examination hall was opened and weighed out there a mixture containing 50 mgs. of radium as a sulfate salt (that is the weight of radium metal was in toto 50 mgs.) and 50 mgs. of metallic lead also as the sulfate salt.
The mixture was then labeled as a crude ore; and the examinees were told that the given ore contained 50 mgs. of radium and 50 mgs. of inactive lead. The examinees were also told that the half-life of radium was for the purposes of this examination 50 thousand years.
The examination question to be answered was: What is the age of the ore in thousands of years? Date the ore and state your reasons.
Almost all the students turned in their papers giving as the age of the ore 50 thousand years, their reasoning being that 50 thousand years was the given half-life of the radium on its decomposition route to inactive lead. Since exactly 50% of the radium had "obviously" decomposed to inactive lead, then the half-life of the radium would show that exactly half of the radioactive radium had already decomposed to lead, so that the age of the sample was merely a case of simple mathematics. The ore was 50 thousand years old.
The examinees who gave that answer - and that was most of them - were each given a passing grade only. The correct answer should have been, of course: the information given us is insufficient to reliably date the ore at all. For the vital concentrations of both the radium and the lead at the beginning of the experiment were not stated and without them a reliable dating of the ore is not possible.
Without this precise information on the starting concentrations no absolute dating of the ore is theoretically possible. In actual fact, of course, we privately know that the sample of "ore" was made up by the examiner a few hours before the examination - in the balance room. A "creation" of the "ore" had occurred in that balance room - in the mind of the examiner - and it was only by excluding this possibility that the students answered without considering this creation possibility in their mind and fell into the trap.
Had they thought to ask what the starting concentrations of radium and lead were, the correct answer would have been in sight. In field tests of radioactive ores the same questions ought to be asked if a really reliable dating answer is to be gained. In field test dating, of course, the scientist can only guess at the starting concentrations of the radium and the lead. If the scientist resorts to the "simple mathematics answer" he is, in his mind, perhaps unconsciously cutting out the possibility of a "creation in the balance room."
The moral is that other errors too are fallen into by the practice of excluding in the mind the practical possibility of a creation ex nihilo; in the past. Experimental error even in science can occur unless we take creation ex nihilo very seriously. There is so much other evidence for a creative act at the foundation of all nature, that our mind set should take it seriously if similar errors as the above reported one are to be avoided. The greatest danger lies in the fact that the 50 thousand years half-life was much too facile to be really true.
This brings us back once more to the sample given to the students in the Middle West State University to date on the basis only of the concentration of radioactive and inactive material present in it. The students "forgot" that if a synthesis , that is, if a "creation" had taken place in the balance room a few hours before the examination started, there was no absolute way of finding that out from radiation and radiation end products by radiometric dating. During any synthesis such as creation would represent, the normal processes of decay are simply not taking place and these processes are the very means by which we measure time in radiometric dating processes. Thus the prerequisites of any dating calculations i.e. constant rates for decay processes; are in abeyance in any synthetic (that is creative) act.
If creative processes have taken place during any part of the world's history then they must annul and cancel out the very decay processes on which dating in general relies.
How is, then, long term dating carried out? An example is better than long philosophical explanations where the volume of words tends to hide the real meaning of those many words:
Radioactive elements such as radium or thorium decompose to other radioactive or inactive elements through a long chain of radioactive stages which are well known. Each stage decomposes to the next stage at a set, predetermined rate so that if one knows experimentally the concentration of each decomposition stage present, then one ought to be able to work out mathematically how long it took a particular sample to reach any particular stage.
Thus various isotopes of lead are reached at the end stages of the uranium decay chains. The lead isotope concentrations then will give an idea of how long it took for a given uranium sample to reach a particular stage of decay.
But there are various hitches to the above perfectly good theoretical scheme for determining the age of a radioactive sample. This fact can be best explained by taking the Potassium/Argon method first. Potassium is radioactive and decomposes radioactively to the noble gas known as argon. The decomposition rate to argon from potassium has been determined with considerable accuracy. Thus, theoretically, it is a case of "just catching the amount of argon given off from a given weight of potassium and the age determination requires just a simple calculation."
A certain amount of potassium will yield a certain amount of argon in a certain amount of time. As the rate of argon production is pretty well independent of the physical conditions surrounding the sample, this radiometric determination would seem to be plain sailing.
But the practice of the dating experiment is vastly different. For argon is, as pointed out above, a noble gas, that is, it does not combine chemically with other substances. The argon on being released from potassium escapes into the crystal lattice of the potassium salt. Here it does not combine chemically with anything that might fix it firmly but becomes physically only loosely entangled in the crystal lattices from which it is easily disentangled. For example, heat and pressure changes can easily displace the argon from its mere physical entanglement in potassium salt crystals. Then the sample of argon is lost to the outside atmosphere. If all the argon has been lost from the crystal then the sample shows according to this method no age, for it has apparently not had the time necessary to accumulate a good large sample of argon.
On the other hand since there is argon; in the atmosphere surrounding the sample, some argon from the air can easily diffuse back into the sample. By which back-diffusion; into the crystal the experimenter is deceived into believing that it actually came from the potassium present. This particular sample contaminated with atmospheric argon must then appear older than it really is.
The volcanic island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland appeared a few decades ago suddenly out of the sea. It came up in an enormous cloud of steam as molten lava from the ocean floor streamed upwards towards to the surface of the ocean. It was colonized by plant and bird life as soon as it had cooled.
A scientist wished to calibrate the potassium argon method by determining the age of the island of Surtsey by the Potassium/Argon method.(22) Thus the age of Surtsey; was found by the Potassium/Argon method to be many millions of years old whereas by actual history it was known to be only a few tens of years old.
What exactly had happened? Argon from the atmosphere had diffused back into the cooling lava and given it thus a false age.
First of all the argon from the potassium decay had been totally driven off from the potassium lattices by the heat of the molten lava. Then the now cold lava absorbed argon from the atmosphere which thus produced the apparent great age of the young, now cold lava laden with argon absorbed from the air - but not generated from decaying potassium.
The lesson to be learned from this calibrating experiment is simple. It is that:
No long term dating method has any scientific value whatsoever unless it has been adequately calibrated on samples of certainly known age. This is the case for all scientific methods - and not only for dating calibration. Calibration is the iron rule which all serious scientists rigidly observe. We can only ask ourselves if certain "old earthers" have taken this rigid scientific rule sufficiently to heart when they solemnly announce that the earth is 4.55 billions of years old? The amount of argon in certain potassium ores "proves" this "scientific fact"!
It is therefore in the eyes of real science little more than mythology when certain astronomers seriously announce in the name of science that the Genesis report on creation is in serious scientific difficulty! In actual fact it is the "old earthers" and astronomers who are in real scientific difficulty for not having learned a primary lesson in science which I had to learn before I started work on my first Ph.D.
My professor took me into his laboratory to carry out my first experiments as a graduate student. I thought he would assign me to experiments in the use of some complex costly instrument or other. But instead he set me to work on calibrating the old instruments in every corner of the lab. I felt really humbled, for I was much too self-important to take on such humdrum work.
My professor was a canny Scotsman and insisted on calibration done by myself so that I would learn to critically assess the meaning of real reliability and the experimental capability of all my instruments thoroughly. He "knew his way around in the laboratory" and insisted on my learning "first things first." "Old earthers" and even some astronomers sometimes just do not question the reliability of their methods or their instruments. For they often seem to have forgotten the importance of the rigid rule of all real science:
Calibrate your instruments and methods first before you launch into wonderful mathematics but using faulty uncalibrated data. They have often not learned to believe nothing, no results at all, from uncalibrated instruments.
The rule of real scientists is to accept no data, indeed nothing at all from instruments that have not been calibrated against known and certain norms.
The results of their "scientific mythology" are endless disputes especially among Bible believing Christians. Scientists ought to desist publishing anything on these "results" at all - to say nothing of not even starting their calculations until they have learned that the kingpin of all serious science lies in taking no notice at all of any data, until calibration against known age samples and norms has been thoroughly and exhaustively carried out.
In principle, because the same thing that has happened with the potassium/argon method can happen even with the lead isotope method (lead isotopes can diffuse into the system or leave the system and nobody knows which process, if any, has occurred).
Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to calibrate all these methods against a known aged sample. Because, however, one cannot always do this in view of the large ages with which the Potassium/Argon and the Uranium/Lead Isotope methods have to do, all ages determined by these methods before calibration against a sample of certainly known age are more than highly suspect: they are indeed absolutely worthless unless calibration against samples of known age has been carried out thoroughly. Of course in principle it is just such a calibration that cannot be done - there are few known samples of sufficient and certain age to use as a norm. (23)
Of course, evolutionary theory itself has been used as the norm, but that is the equivalent of lifting oneself out of the bog by pulling on one's own boot straps. It is using the theory to prove the theory.
Even the lead isotope method is subject to suspicion, for there are few samples of certainly known age to calibrate it against. It is not that an isotope of lead is volatile like argon, but that lead can enter or leave the system, thus falsifying the age determination. Unless a method or a sample can be calibrated against a sample of known and certain age, no method of long term dating is absolutely fool-proof or certain.
Because the C14 method ;works in thousands of years rather than in millions, it was successfully calibrated against tree rings up to nearly 10,000 years old (actually up to round about 6000 years using the bristle cone pines in California). But when it comes to the potassium argon and the lead isotope methods there are few samples of certainly known age; against which one can calibrate the millions of years which might come into question here. There is one notable exception to this calibration difficulty which we have already cited in the now classical case of the Island of Surtsey.
Let us look again, this time a little more closely, at the lead isotope method of dating ;on which the latest estimated age of the earth; (4.55 billion years) rests.(24)
According to Faure the age of 4.55 billion years was established by Patterson in 1956 who had analyzed three stone and two iron meteorites for lead isotopes and compared them with one sample of oceanic sediment. The results all fell on e straight line so that Patterson concluded that the age of the meteorites was the same as that of the earth, that is allegedly 4.55 billion years old.
Faure maintained that he had found that "deep sea sediment contains lead whose isotopic composition; varies regionally and not all of them fit the meteorite isochron as well as the sample which Patterson analyzed." Faure, instead of updating Patterson's original date, adopted it unchanged, knowing it to be incorrect.
Alexander Williams asks himself why Faure did this. Gale, Arden and Hutchinson obtained more data on meteorite lead isotope ratios and using the same reasoning as Patterson they came to the conclusion that the earth had a negative age!
Would it not be safer and more scientific to say that until we can calibrate all our isotope methods against samples of known age (which is practically the universal practice in other branches of scientific research) it would be more scientific to say that we have no idea of the real age of the earth or the universe? Except, of course, that which was revealed to us from the One Who created it all?
For further information on Long Age Isotope dating it is recommended that the paper by Alexander R. Williams; in "Technical Journal" be "studied, marked, learned and inwardly digested". To reject biblical time tables and dating on the basis of experiments carried out using uncalibrated instruments and methods would be termed in some strictly scientific research laboratories "pseudo scientific."
The Surtsey (Iceland) dating by the Potassium/Argon method, constitutes an excellent calibration method, for the age of the Island of Surtsey was historically well known. This sure historical method showed that Potassium Argon was totally unreliable when materials of known age were found, on which the method could be reliably calibrated.
22.See "New Scientist", July 3rd. 1975 p. 20 23.See the Surtsey example cited. 24.Alexander R. Williams, "Long Age Isotope Dating Short on Credibility", Creation ex nihilo, Technical Journal, Vol. 6, Part 1, 1992 pages 2-5, ex nihilo, Creation Research Foundation, Sunnybank, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia