Just how silly are they over at RememberThyCreator.com?

Young-earthers are just about the most reality-challenged folks around. But over at the RememberThyCreator.com site — you know, the one with the silly poll that got spiked recently by Pharyngulites, hopefully teaching the RTC team a thing or two about what and what not to do on the intarweebs — they have just about the silliest set of reasons why people should "not accept millions of years," but rather, presumably, 6000 years, as the proper age of the Earth. "Wow!" you must be thinking, "you mean they have actual evidence the Earth is young?" W-e-lll, no, not exactly. What they have is simply a list of indignant assertions that accepting an old Earth contradicts Biblical myths, and thus must be rejected out of hand. Here's a sample:

The Bible clearly teaches that God created in six literal 24 hour days a few thousand years ago.

The Hebrew word for day in Genesis 1 is yom. In the vast majority of its uses in the Old Testament it means a literal day and where it doesn’t the context makes this clear.

Similarly, the context of Genesis 1 clearly shows that the days of creation were literal days. First, yom is defined the first time it is used in the Bible in its two literal senses: the light portion of the light/dark cycle and the whole light/dark cycle (Gen 1:4-5). Second, yom is used with “evening” and “morning”. Third, yom is modified with a number: one day, second day, third day, etc., which everywhere else in the Old Testament indicates literal days. Fourth, yom is defined literally in Genesis 1:14 in relation to the heavenly bodies.

You see the unimpeachable brilliance of their scientific methodology here: if the Bible says it, it's true, full stop. Boy, and here we all were thinking that knowledge about how the world works took a lot of hard work and study. You know, decades of research, learning, field work, experimentation, trial and error, cataloguing your findings, revising them, publishing them, have them peer reviewed, going back to the drawing board when it's been shown some of your findings are wrong and need further study.

Nope! Don't have to do none o' that! As the intrepid Dr. Terry Mortenson reveals over at RTC.com, all you have to do is check what's written in a book of Bronze Age myths and legends, and voila, all you ever need to learn about anything is right there, and unquestionably true!

"But what about all that doggone pesky evidence we have that the earth is, in fact, billions of years old?" you ask? Never fear. It's denialism to the rescue. Mortenson writes:

The idea of millions of years did not come from the scientific facts.

It was developed by deistic and atheistic geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century. These men used anti-biblical philosophical and religious assumptions to interpret the geological observations in a way that plainly contradicted the Biblical account of creation, the Flood and the age of the earth. The “deep time” idea flows out of naturalistic assumptions, not scientific observations.

Radiometric dating methods do not prove millions of years.

Radiometric dating was not developed until the early 20th century, by which time the whole world had already accepted the millions of years. In recent years creationists in the “RATE project” have done experimental, theoretical and field research to uncover … evidence and to show that decay rates were orders of magnitude faster in the past, which shrinks the millions of years date to thousands of years, confirming the Bible.

Mortenson's bio tells us he has a Ph.D. in the "history of geology" from Coventry University in England. I'd very much like to know what Mortenson has published professionally. That he has retreated to the AiG stable indicates that his academic or scientific career has not been especially impressive, at least in terms of achievements as a working geologist. Mortenson's achievements as an evangelical are not in dispute, as Googling him reveals nothing but page after page of creationist, Christian, and conservative sites, and nothing from any mainstream scientific source to show that the man has done anything in the way of field work at all. And the only papers Mortenson seems to write have titles like "Boundaries on Creation and Noah’s Flood: Early 19th century scriptural geologists," and are presented exclusively at religious seminars and similar forums.

Given Mortenson's lack of post-collegiate work in his field (he went to get a doctorate in "divinity," so it seems clear he's been focusing on that), it's still kind of surprising he would collapse into a life of anti-science so completely. But what's funny about the things he says regarding radiometric dating above is what immediately precedes it. He launches into a deliriously silly conspiracy theory, naming no names and citing no sources, that the notion of "deep time" was in fact concocted by "deistic and atheistic geologists in the late 18th and early 19th century" (!) with an agenda to discredit the Bible. All their scientific work was just in aid of promoting a predetermined agenda.

Can you say, "Project much?" It's a common character flaw of creos that they project all their own least commendable traits onto those of us they hate. But this takes the cake. Who is this sinister cabal of Regency-era atheists and deists? Why would deists and atheists work together anyway? And how did it come to be that they gained such control over the geological sciences? Maybe Mortenson learned all this while getting his doctorate in the history of geology, and his dissertation is a blistering exposé of these people. But we certainly can't know from reading this little article, and frankly, I have no interest in donating to AiG to get Mortenson's full "brochure" promising further details. (Another blow against peer review! Brochures! The vanity press of the evangelical anti-science movement!)

We know, on the other hand, that YEC's and other creationist "scientists" do all their work in the interests of furthering a predetermined ideology and shoring up preconceived dogmas. And if we didn't know it before, we would now. Because the Wedge Document tells us so, and this little article of Mortenson's tells us so. If it contradicts the Bible, throw it out. It's wrong. Mortenson's scientific "objectivity" could not be clearer, could it?

The RATE project itself was one of those desperate creationist "research" projects whose participants had decided in advance what results they would collect and accept. Far from debunking the validity of radiometric dating techniques, its methods were deeply flawed — not the least because, as J.G. Meert has pointed out, none of the project's members had any expertise in experimental geochronology, nor had they published anything involving radiometric dating in the mainstream scientific literature. (Oh yes, but there's that horrible Big Science cabal with their secret decoder rings and handshakes who expel these noble Christian scientists from their august pages. I forgot. Thanks, Ben.) ICR's Grand Canyon Project has been taken apart on TalkOrigins, as well.

"Science" that is done to validate an ideology, whether extreme examples like Adolf and the boys looking for "racial purity" through eugenics, or merely pathetic examples like creationists hoping against hope for a 6000-year-old Earth (which they seem to think is the only kind their omnipotent God is capable of), always crumbles into chaos and confusion. Shoehorning the supernatural into the natural never explains anything, and always muddies the waters. Lately, we've had another creationist troll pop up here flogging the usual foolish notion that any "gap" in scientific knowledge is necessarily filled only by his God. But what's at the heart of this isn't science, let alone the spirit of curiosity and passion that leads to scientific inquiry and the knowledge gained thereby. It's merely the insecurity of the religious mind, seeking, in Isaac Asimov's words, "a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold." The idea that the universe might not be all about us is still deeply, existentially terrifying to most people.

But trying to cloak that insecurity in pseudoscience to validate it does no one any good. Better to admit — as so few fundamentalists can — that maybe you're wrong, an attitude indispensible to any real scientific mind. And from that point, to see where the evidence actually leads you, which can often be in surprising and fulfilling directions.

There's a gag from an old Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode that I'm reminded of here. In one dreadful movie, there's a white-coated scientist working late in his lab, and one of the 'bots riffs, "Wow, what a day! I invented Gaines Burgers and I didn't even mean to!" Silly as that is, it does sum up what happens in real science, as opposed to the dogma-bound pseudoscience of the YEC's. Often unexpected results lead you down entirely new and undreamt-of paths of inquiry. How tragically sad that there are those out there who think themselves scientists, may even have a shiny Ph.D. saying they've got the training for it...and who choose to throw all that away in favor of hiding behind the skirts of religion's insecurities, and the lies that must be told continually to keep the rents in those skirts patched.