Glenn Morton's Evidence Examined

Uh, just where did anyone "concede it's findable by YEC methods"? Rather, what I've been seeing them say is that a YEC who follows standard geological practice would be able to find oil. Nothing about YEC methods being useful in that endeavor.There are many analogies we can draw from. You could have the most hare-brained wrong ideas about cooking and baking, but so long as you follow the recipe you will get the desired results. But where did those recipes come from? From cooks and bakers who did understand food science and how cooking and baking does actually work.In Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation (1951), after the predicted collapse of the Galactic Empire, the Foundation started to export technology cloaked as religion. The neighboring worlds would send their acolytes to be trained by the Foundation priests and those technician-priests would perform the requisite rituals and say the requisite prayers and then push the green button to start up the fusion reactor, etc. I read that when I was an Air Force computer repair technician and I saw how that applied to several of the technicians I was working with. You do not need to understand how something works in order to operate or maintain it; all you need to is to know and to follow the procedures for those tasks. And who wrote those procedures? People who do actually know how those systems work.So for a YEC to be able to find oil, he needs to use procedures developed and published by old-earth geologists (OEG, AKA "real geologists"). That YEC will not be using YEC methods, but rather OEG methods. That a YEC following OEG methods should be able to find oil does not in any way validate YEC methods.The formation of the geologic structures which trap oil cannot be explained by YEC methods. The distribution of index fossils cannot be explained by YEC methods. The association of oil and gas with such structures and such index fossils cannot be explained by YEC methods. However, they can all be explained by OEG methods.Furthermore, early in the history of oil exploration it took OEG knowledge and understanding to anticipate what kinds of structures and which index fossils to should be associate with oil and gas deposits. The only way that association could have been worked out without OEG would have been purely by trial and error.Though there have been attempts to use YEC methods to explore for oil. One YEC explanation for oil formation is by meteor impact and some YECs have tried exploring about impact sites, but with no success. There's also at least one company, Zion Oil & Gas, Inc, (reported about on NPR, 2013 Nov 27) which has been using the Bible to find oil without any success, though they do raise a lot of money from fundamentalist donations (kind of reminds one of Mel Brooks' The Producers).So when you use OEG methods you can find oil, but not when you use YEC methods.

Excuse me, but you just completely avoided the issues. And you lifted my statement out of context in typical deliberately lying creationist fashion. Is this your admission that you are deliberately lying?Let us leave that dilemma for a moment.The entire question of what I had said concerned whether YEC methods were usable. Well, are they? Nothing in your "reply" says anything one way or the other. I stated that "a YEC who follows standard geological practice would be able to find oil." And that there is " Nothing about YEC methods being useful in that endeavor."You say, "Relative dating isn't standard geological practice for finding oil." And yet that is exactly what the other members you want to claim as supporting your position are saying. So you claim what they say as supporting your position while at the same time denying that everything and anything they say has nothing to do with finding oil. So then which is it???? Is it A or is it B? You are trying to claim both. So then how does that not constitute lying on your part?

No, that is not his own website, but rather another site echoing his old site. His old web site is no longer, having been taken down in ... a fit ... er ... uh ...Here is the explanation offered by an antagonist to creationism, Anon-Ra at this URLSome fragments of Glenn R. Morton's former site remain, eg, http://web.archive.org/...062417/http://home.entouch.net/dmd, at the WayBack Machine web archive site. It seems to have captured most of his old site, though unfortunately none of his report on an "intelligent design" conference he had attended. Fortunately it did capture his "Personal Stories of the Creation/Evolution Struggle" pages.Edited by dwise1, : WayBackMachine link

I first heard of Glenn R. Morton from Robert Schadewald's report on the 1986 International Conference on Creationism (ICC). That was also when I first learned how "creation science" can destroy the faith of its followers. How "creation science" destroys creationists' faith was nicely summarized by the ICR's John Morris in his response to Morton's question, "How old is the earth?":

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"If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning."

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That link is to my collection of quotes, including this exerpt from Schadewald's article:

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{Glenn R. Morton, practicing petroleum geologist and staunch creationist, asked John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR)}, "How old is the earth?" "If the earth is more than 10,000 years old then Scripture has no meaning." Morton then said that he had hired several graduates of Christian Heritage College {which formerly housed the ICR}, and that all of them suffered severe crises of faith. They were utterly unprepared to face the geological facts every petroleum geologist deals with on a daily basis.

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(Corroborated by Glenn Morton in Why I left Young-earth Creationism)

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Morton's degree was in physics. He was not schooled in standard geology, but rather in YEC Flood Geology; everything he knew about geology he had learned from the ICR. He also wrote several creationist geology articles for the Creation Research Society Quarterly and ghost-wrote the creationist section of one of Josh McDowell's books.Interesting thing about the ICR's graduate studies. They were much more interested in weeding out what they didn't believe in rather than to promote research, which is what graduate programs normally want to promote. I have a copy of the report of the visitation committee when California was considering whether to accredidate the ICR graduate program. The committee witnessed one of the classes in session. The class used a standard textbook used by most graduate courses. The instructor was having all the students go through the textbook page by page and telling them exactly what to strike out because "we don't believe that."That is what the ICR had taught Morton and the ICR graduate students he had hired. Here are geological facts that do not exist and cannot exist if Scripture is to have any meaning. And then each and every one of them, each and every day, had to stare in the face those very geological facts that the ICR had taught them did not exist and could not exist if Scripture were to have any meaning.Faith, Glenn R. Morton did what you would never do: he looked at the evidence.Faith, I would like to personally thank you for your tireless efforts to promote the growth and spread of atheism.

One perennial creationist claim is that the speed of light is slowing down (AKA "c-decay"), which would have the effect of changing the rates of radioactive decay, such that 6000-year-old rock would be false dated to be millions or billions of years.Of course, that claim is utterly false. Some lines of evidence disproving it are astronomical. I couldn't find Jar's NGC 6264 on Wikipedia, but Glenn R. Morton (would that make this on-topic?) discussed Supernova 1987A in his article, Young-Earth Arguments: A Second Look:

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Supernova 1987A proves the speed of light has been constant for 170,000 years.

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If the speed of light has changed, then

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1. the rates of radioactive decay will also have changed.

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2. the energy of radiation emitted by an atom will change.

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In 1987 a star in the Large Magellanic Cloud exploded. Or rather, the light from the explosion reached earth. Nine months later astronomers discovered a ring of gas with a diameter of 1.37 light years around the former star. They also discovered the characteristic gamma ray emission of Co-57 and Co-56. These gamma rays had the same energy that we observe in an earth laboratory. This means that the speed of light was the same as it is today when the star exploded. Theoretical models of a supernova said that the decay of radioactive Co-56 and Co-57 would power the light given off by the supernova gases. The light curve has decayed at precisely the half-life as we measure in our labs for Co-56 and Co-57. This further confirms that the speed of light was the same as today when the star exploded. The time it took the light to travel from the supernova to the ring allows us to measure the size of the gas ring shown above. Knowing this and the angular size of the ring as seen in a telescope gives us a distance of 170,000 light years to the star. Thus, since the distance to the supernova can be trigonometrically determined, the speed of light has been constant for the past 170,000 years.

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Unless God created a grand illusion, then the universe is at least 170,000 years old.

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On that same page, Glenn R. Morton also discussed:

• Are Radioactive Dates Wrong? Woodmorappe quotemined through the scientific literature for bad dates. Morton points out that not only do they still track the right date, but a bad date is more likely to be too young instead of too old. Plus the dates aren't off enough to support a 6000-year-old-earth.
• Varves. Creationist alternative explanations for varves do not match the varves we actually find.
• Pollen in the varves.
• Carbon 14 and Varves.
• Buried River Channel.
• THE SHRINKING SUN. Includes good graph of a wide range of measurements made, such that a creationist arguing for the "shrinking sun" would have to cherry-pick most of them out of existence. If anything, the sun is slowly increasing in size.
• Supernova 1987A proves the speed of light has been constant for 170,000 years.
• 10 years of Root Growth from 7,000 feet down. So that buried layer not only had life growing on it in the past, but they had been living there for at least 10 years.