Young Earther Grand Canyon Age Project

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was wondering if anyone has come across what happened to Dr. Andrew Snelling’s project to measure the age of the Grand Canyon.

To refresh your memories:
Snelling is a Young Earth Creationist that wants to “scientifically prove” the earth is only 6000 years old.

He applied to the US National Park Service in 2013 to collect rock samples from the Grand Canyon and was a turned down. He sued them and in 2017 the Park Service agreed to allow him to proceed.

I haven’t been able to find any news since the first 2017 stories on what’s happened since - did he end up collecting and analyzing the samples? Any findings?

2

I think you need to stop getting your information about the history of actual science from the websites of delusional religious zealots. There is no such thing as “creation science”, it is an oxymoron.

3

Sorry, what idea of geological stability? Is this some kind of misinterpretation of uniformitarianism? Because even Darwin’s geologist pal Lyell wasn’t an absolutist about it.

4

Could he mean pre-plate tectonics?

5

I couldn’t decide whether he was talking about uniformitarianism or pre-plate tectonics. Either way the idea that it “held up science” for 50 years is silly. Evolution is compatible with uniformitarianism, as well as with occasional catastrophes like asteroid impacts. And while plate tectonics changed our understanding of volcanism and biogeography, it didn’t change understanding of local geological processes.

6

I think that’s it. The post is hard to follow, but I think it’s basically the Galileo gambit. Scientists conspire to defend the orthodoxy against attacks, but they were wrong about certain things in the past, so the fact that they vilify [whatever nonsense] just shows that they are trying cover up the truth of [whatever nonsense].

7

I took Earth Science in 9th grade back in 1965-6, before plate tectonics got accepted. There was no thought of geological stability. They had a mechanism for mountain building, which was wrong, but I didn’t get a uniformitarian view.

8

Uniformitarianism in geology doesn’t mean that everything has always been stable, but rather that we can understand processes in the past by observing processes still at work in the present. It was developed in contrast to catastrophism, which proposed that geological formations were produced by huge catastrophes like Noah’s flood. In fact, plate tectonics is compatible with uniformitarianism (while creationism often appeals to catastrophes). In general, modern science still is basically uniformitarian, while recognizing that past catastrophes like asteroid impacts have sometimes had large effects.

9

Great and Informative discussion. Thanks.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Snelling has either done the research or if he has, he’s suppressed the results for obvious reasons.

10

Quite. One doesn’t build a scientific career by defending orthodoxy, but by breaking it, finding something new and sensational. “My finding supports Einstein,” ho-hum. “My finding refutes Einstein,” wow! Cretinists try to refute mainstream science by supporting religious orthodoxy. Sorry, facts beat fantasy, or else prayer would cure STDs.

But there’s an ironclad argument: It’s all a miracle; miracles can’t be scientifically probed; thus science is a dead end, QED. Earth looks old because Jehovah, the former Baalite war god, created everything pre-antiqued just to trick humans, to test their faith.

But why didn’t the Lord of the Israelites tell them about kangaroos?

11

  1. Put there by God as a test of your faith; or

  2. Put there by Satan, to tempt you into disbelief; or

  3. Dinosaurs were too big to go on the Ark, they all died in the Flood.

“There were giants in the Earth in those days”

12

Basically, yeah.

What is fascinating about this is that in the age of the growth of science, the 18th and 19th centuries, as scientists wrestled to figure out how old the Earth was - something they were unable to agree on until radiation and atomic theory came along, because without it you cannot explain how the Sun can be as old as it is - NOBODY was a young earth creationist. Nobody doing scientific work thought that. Many were wrong about many things, but that wasn’t one of them. Many, many leading thinkers in those days were pious men. Hell, many of them were actual ministers. None believed the world was only 6000 years old.

“The Earth is only six thousand years old” is a very modern legend, relatively speaking. It wasn’t a serious belief for most of the time after the Enlightenment. I doubt it was before.

13

Well, there is the (in)famous Ussher chronology. At least in 17th century Protestant circles, the idea that Earth and the Universe could be definitely dated to 4004 B.C. or thereabouts does seem to have been taken fairly seriously.

14

Beware holy math. “Figgers don’t lie but liars figger.”

15

Math is completely value-neutral, and will give you the logical implications of your assumptions without questioning those assumptions.

As long as your assumptions avoid self-contradiction, the math will work even though it’s utterly divorced from reality.

Of course, doing the math is yet another way the Young Earth Creationists fail utterly: If you do the math by counting tree rings, you find that there are trees older than the Earth is supposed to be. For example, Methuselah is a still-living tree 501 years older than the Earth is supposed to be, by their dogma.