the RATE guys just turned around and said "Goddidit! We'll find out how later on!
I don't think that is what they said at all.
That's exactly what they did say.
Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 Years Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay :
quote:
One way to reconcile these two hourglass readings is to suggest that one of them has a "valve" at its bottleneck controlling the trickling rate, a valve that was adjusted drastically in the past, possibly by direct intervention from God.
...
Thus our new diffusion data support the main hypothesis of the RATE research initiative: that God drastically accelerated the decay rates of long half-life nuclei during the earth's recent past. For a feasibility study of this hypothesis including God's possible purposes for such acceleration, Biblical passages hinting at it, disposal of excess heat, preserving life on earth, and effects on stars, see Humphreys (2000, pp. 333-379). The last three problems are not yet fully solved, but we expect to see progress on them in future papers.
(No progress has been reported in the last ten years. They've given the sheeple some scientifikaly-sounding pablum and achieved their goals. There's no more for them to do.)
John Baumgardner:
quote:
As to how this relates to the varves issue, what I am saying is that the RATE team believes it has several independent lines of evidence that the standard radioisotope time scale is in seriour error, primarily because the uniformitarian assumption that nuclear decay rates are time-invariant does not hold. The reason is that there is an Agency outside the cosmos Who can and has intervened in the world's physical history (2 peter 3:3-7).
A Tale of Two Hourglasses:
quote:
On the other hand, changes in the physical laws governing the nucleus of the atom would not greatly affect things outside the nucleus, such as the outer electrons of the atom, chemistry, or life. RATE's hypothesis has been that during several short episodes in Earth history (for example, the Genesis Flood). God changed nuclear forces in order to greatly accelerate nuclear decay, particularly for nuclei that now decay very slowly. I have discussed7 many Scriptures suggesting that God did exactly that.
RATE in Review: Unresolved Problems:
quote:
Of greater concern to both supporters and skeptics of the RATE project is the issue of how to dispose of the tremendous quantities of heat generated by accelerated decay during the Genesis Flood. The amount of heat produced by a decay rate of a million times faster than normal during the year of the Flood could potentially vaporize the earth’s oceans, melt the crust, and obliterate the surface of the earth. The RATE group is confident that the accelerated decay they discovered was not only caused by God, but that the necessary removal of heat was also superintended by Him as well.
They made a good case to suggest that the evidence for an old earth is not so cut dry "etched in stone" (pardon my pun).
In the real world, they blundered in so many ways it's impossible to describe in one message. See
RATE (Radioactivity and the Age of The Earth): Analysis and Evaluation of Radiometric Dating,
Assessing the RATE Project (both put together by evangelical christians) and
Creation Science Exposed: Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (a Progressive Creationist Christian website). From the second link, reviewing the second RATE book:
quote:
The authors report that faced with this evidence, a young-earth advocate must address at least two key scientific problems resulting from a one-year period of accelerated decay rates during the Flood. The first is the heat problem. Thermal energy from radioactive processes is a major source of heat in the earth. If those processes were accelerated by many orders of magnitude, the earth would have quickly evaporated from the heat had there not been an extraordinary mechanism of cooling. The authors state:
quote:
The removal of heat was so rapid that it likely involved a process other than conduction, convection, or radiation We believe it may be possible to discover how [God] did it (p. 763).
Future research is suggested along the lines of Russell Humphreys’ idea of volumetric cooling based on relativistic principles even though this known phenomenon, the basis for red-shifting of starlight, does not apply to bound particles such as the earth. It is acknowledged that this approach, even if it were valid, has the difficulty of being uniform rather than selective as would be needed to cool only radioactive material and not, for example, the oceans. In other words, the authors acknowledge that accelerated decay requires a most unusual heat removal mechanism that is outside the known laws of thermodynamics. The second unresolved problem cited in the book is the radiation problem. How did Noah and his passengers survive a year in which radioactivity was one million times greater than it is today? No known solution exists, they state. Nevertheless, The RATE group is confident that these issues will be solved
5. Current Optimism about Future Resolutions
The leap to the conclusion is never made clear. Confidence in a future resolution of extraordinary scientific contradiction moves smoothly to a message to Christians in general to encourage them regarding the reliability of the Bible (p. 768). In other words, the expectation of a future solution to a major scientific impasse is being translated into conferences, books, and videos proclaiming the good news that the RATE project has demonstrated the scientific validity of a young earth.
The conclusions of the RATE project are being billed as groundbreaking results. This is a fairly accurate description since a group of creation scientists acknowledge that hundreds of millions of years worth of radioactivity have occurred. They attempt to explain how this massive radioactivity could have occurred in a few thousand years but admit that consistent solutions have not yet been found. The vast majority of the book is devoted to providing technical details that the authors believe prove that the earth is young and that radioisotope decay has not always been constant. All of these areas of investigation have been addressed elsewhere by the scientific community and have been shown to be without merit. The only new data provided in this book are in the category of additional details and there are no significantly new claims.
In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.
{emphasis added}
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