The Light Time Problem

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I'm still waiting Paulk.

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Tell me what you interpret the light
from day one and day 4 to be.

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How can you criticize my viewpoints;
yet, are not willing to offer your own?

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What was the daylight on day one?

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And, without the sun being the determining
factor, what caused the light?

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Furthermore, what then caused the night
(Darkness), if the earth didn't rotate to
face away from the sun?

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These questions have to be answered.

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God tells us to prove everything.

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Edited by jar, : see AbE

Edited by jar, : still more applin spallin

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

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• CA201. Evolution is only a theory.
• CA202. Evolution has not been proved.
• CA601.1. Evolution's materialism or naturalism denies a role for God.
• CA602. Evolution is atheistic.
  No more "atheistic" than gravity or osmosis are, which begs the question of how creationists are also misrepresenting atheism. As I described today in Message 54, creationism's false dichotomy, The Two Model Approach (TMA), posits two "mutually exclusive models for origins": their "atheistic" evolution model" and their "creation model" which they absolutely refuse to ever present, support, or defend ("Because this is a scientific discussion and including the creation model would be injecting religion" (despite their having created the TMA as a deliberately crafted legalistic deception to allow them to describe their opposition to evolution as being "for completely scientific reasons, nothing religious about it."
  The irony here is that Dr. Henry Morris himself informed me personally (and wrote the same in his books) that their "evolution model" "includes most of the world's religions, ancient and modern." So a major portion of that "evolution model" consists of theistic creation accounts, which creationists call "atheistic." Theism is atheistic? Peccable creationist logic!
• CB100. Mutations are rare.
• CB101. Most mutations are harmful.
• CB101.1. Mutations are accidents; things do not get built by accident.
• CB101.2. Mutations do not produce new features.
• CB102. Mutations do not add information.
• CB110. Microevolution selects only existing variation.
• CB120. Genetic load from mutations would make populations unviable.
• CB121. The cost of natural selection is prohibitive (Haldane's dilemma).
• CB130. "Junk" DNA is not really junk.
• CB141. Chromosome counts differ greatly and unsystematically between species.
• CB144. Human and chimp genomes differ by more than one percent.
• CB150. Functional genetic sequences are too rare to evolve from one to another.
• CB200. Some systems are irreducibly complex.
• CB300. Complex organs couldn't have evolved.
• CB301. The eye is too complex to have evolved.
  Darwin wrote that at first blush our faculties are unable to visualize the evolution of the eye (operative verb being "imagine"). That is all that most creationist quote minings of that passage include, leaving out the rest which says that one can indeed work that problem out using reason (much like we cannot visualize more dimensions than three, but we can work with much higher dimensions with mathematics). And then Darwin went on for 3 or 4 more pages describing existing eyes in nature that would represent each step of the evolutionary path to the vertebrate eye.
  So what's the problem?
  (see also CB921.1: What use is half an eye?)
• CB302. The ear is too complex to have evolved.
• CB303. The brain is too complex to have evolved.
  (see also CB400: Behavior and Cognition)
• CB310. The bombardier beetle is too complex to have evolved.
• CB310.1. Bombardier beetle chemicals would explode if mixed without an inhibitor.
  A classic example of deliberate lying by creationist professionals. When Dr. Duane Gish of the ICR was guest speaker for Awbrey and Thwaites' two-model class at SDSU where he spoke on "Bomby" and repeated that false claim of spontaneous explosion, A&T mixed the two chemicals together right there in class and the mixture ... changed color. Gish blamed the translator of the original article (he would always blame someone else for his false claims) and admitted that that claim was wrong. Then he went on to continue using it for years afterwards, finally responding to too many embarrassing questions about it by changing the wording of the claim slightly though essentially keeping it the same.

  ​

  This was the first question I had used to open discussion with a creationist, Charles, at work, my first discussion with a creationist. We both attended a 1985 debate between Gish & Morris versus Awbrey & Thwaites. Every table at that debate was selling "Bomby" books, which embarrassed Charles very greatly since he now knew the truth about that. When the debate ended and we were walking out, he was in shock and kept muttering, "We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they present any of it? We have mountains of evidence. ... " Half a decade later I bumped into Charles again. He was still a fundie, but he absolutely hated creationists and wanted nothing to do with those liars.
• CB311. Butterfly metamorphosis is too complex to have evolved.
• CB311.1. Evolution can't explain butterfly evolving from caterpillar.
  Part of that is because populations evolve, not individuals! Stupid creationists don't even know what evolution is! And if we want to figure out how butterfly metamorphosis works, then research it! Which I'm sure has been done. Analyzing the enzymes involved should help to solve that mystery and studying the genome should help to work out the evolutionary path. Though comparing butterfly studies with studies of the other forms of metamorphosis should shed even more light on the question. Just using the creationist approach (standing there with your thumb up your rectum saying "Duuuh, looks insolvable to me!") will not cut it.
• CB325. The giraffe neck could not evolve without a special circulatory system.
• CB340. Organs and organ systems would have been useless until all parts were in place.
• CB341. Snake venom and hollow fangs could not have evolved simultaneously.
• CB350. Sex cannot have evolved.
  (see also CB610: no mate for 1st of a species.)
  Creationist presentations of this particular "unanswerable question" (a typical fundamentalist dishonest proselytizing trick, damn their eyes!) are among the absolutely stupidest I have ever seen.
• CB381. Men have fewer ribs than women.
  I have never seen this one in the wild, but apparently it is still current since Answers in Genesis included it in their article, "Claims that We Wish Creationists Avoid Using."
• CB601. The traditional peppered moth story is no longer supportable.
• CB601.1. Peppered moths do not rest on tree trunks, and pictures of them there were faked.
• CB601.2. Peppered moths occur in uncamouflaged colors in many areas.
• CB601.2.1. Dark moths never completely replaced light ones in Manchester.
• CB601.2.2. In several areas dark moths were more common than expected.
• CB601.2.3. Dark moths increased in s. Britain after pollution control began.
• CB601.2.4. In places, light moths increased before lichens reappeared.
• CB601.2.5. Light moths increased before trees got lighter.
• CB601.3. Direct mutagenesis better explains peppered moth variation.
• CB601.4. An increased recapture rate suggests fraud in Kettlewell's data.
• CB610. The first individual of a new species would not find a mate.
  This claim is based on the absolutely stupidest descriptions of how a new species evolves, a description which has absolutely nothing to do with how evolution or just plain life itself actually works. IOW, creationists completely misunderstand evolution so drastically that it boggles the minds of normals.
• CB620. Human population growth indicates a young earth.
  Yet another drastically stupid claim. I posted an essay on it on CompuServe back in the day and reposted it on my web site: THE BUNNY BLUNDER
• CB701. Haeckel falsified his embryo pictures.
• CB701.1. Recapitulation theory is not supported.
• CB704. Human embryos do not have gill slits.
• CB710. Genes with major effects on development are conserved across phyla.
• CB731. Finger development disproves birds descended from dinosaurs.
• CB732. Finger development differs greatly between human and frog.
• CB751. Bilateral symmetry is improbable under evolution.
• CB801. Science cannot define "species."
• CB805. Evolution predicts a continuum of organisms, not discrete kinds.
• CB810. Homology cannot be evidence of ancestry if it is defined thus.
• CB811. Homologous structures are not produced by homologous genes.
• CB821. Phylogenetic analyses are inconsistent.
• CB822. Evolution's tree-like pattern is discredited.
• CB901. Macroevolution has never been observed.
• CB901.1. Range of variation is limited within kinds.
• CB901.2. No new phyla, classes, or orders have appeared.
• CB901.3. Darwin's finches show only microevolution.
• CB902. Microevolution is distinct from macroevolution.
• CB902.1. There are barriers to large change.
• CB902.2. Small changes do not imply large changes.
• CB904. No entirely new features have evolved.
• CB910. No new species have been observed.
• CB910.1. Fruit fly experiments produce only fruit flies.
• CB910.2. Peppered moths remained the same species.
• CB920. No new body parts have evolved.
• CB921. New structures would be useless until fully developed.
• CB921.1. What use is half an eye?
  The closest thing to a creationist scenario for the evolution of an eye the I have ever seen was them imagining each individual eye part evolving separately and independently of all the other parts, each part useless for vision all on its own, until all parts are finally assembled in the end like a camera in a factory. More explicitly, those independent eye parts were defined by taking a razor blade and slicing them out of an existing eye. Yeah, extremely stupid; there's stupid, and there's brain-dead stupid, but then there's creationist stupid which is so much dimmer than all the rest.

  ​

  How it actually worked was described by Darwin which was repeated by Dawkins in his book, The Blind Watchmaker (in the first half of Chapter 3, "Accumulating Small Change", as I seem to recall). Every step of the way you still have a functional light sensing organ, so the evolving eye is functional every step of the way.
• CB921.2. What use is half a wing?
• CB922. No two-celled life exists intermediate between one- and multicelled.
• CB925. We do not see creatures in various stages of completion.
• CB926. Preadaptation implies that organs evolved before they were needed.
• CB930. Some fossil species are still living.
• CB940. Pure chance cannot create new structures.
• CB940.1. Odds of many successive beneficial mutations are minuscule.
• CB941. How do things know how to evolve?
• CC001. Piltdown man was a hoax.
• CC001.1. Piltdown man was the subject of 500 doctoral dissertations.
• CC002. Nebraska man was a hoax.
• CC003. Lucy's knee was found far from the rest of the skeleton.
• CC004. Ten Peking Man skeletons were suppressed.
• CC030. All human fossils would fit on a billiard table.
• CC050. All hominid fossils are fully human or fully ape.
• CC101. Human footprints have been found with dinosaur tracks at Paluxy.
• CC150. If we are descended from apes, why are there still apes around?
• CC200. Transitional fossils are lacking.
• CC200.1. There should be billions of transitional fossils.
• CC201. We should see smooth change through the fossil record, not gaps.
• CC201.1. Punctuated equilibrium was ad hoc to justify gaps.
• CC214.1. Archaeopteryx was probably not an ancestor of modern birds.
• CC214.1.1. Archaeopteryx is fully bird
  In the notes for their two-model class, Awbrey & Thwaites compared 27 characteristics of coelurosaurs, birds, and Archaeopteryx. In two features, all three groups were the same. In two other features (feathers and fused clavicles (wishbone)) Archaeopteryx was the same as birds and different from coelurosaurs. In 17 other features Archaeopteryx was different from birds and the same as coelurosaurs. And in the final 6 features, Archaeopteryx was intermediate between birds and Coelurosaurs. To quote from John Wayne: "Archaeopteryx is fully bird"? Not hardly!

  ​

  Funny story to demonstrate the extent that creationists will go to make their false claims. In an ICR Impact article, Dr. Duane Gish spent most of the article presenting the usual false arguments for Archaeopteryx being "100% bird, nothing dinosaurian about it", but then towards the end of the article he notes the then-recent claim by a couple creationists that Archaeopteryx was actually dinosaur fossils that had been modified to included feathers carved in by hoaxters. So suddenly Gish switched to arguing that Archaeopteryx was instead "100% dinosaur, nothing avian about it". So then according to Gish's article Archaeopteryx was 100% bird and 100% dinosaur, but not a combination of the two. And a combination of the two is precisely what Archaeopteryx was.
• CC300. The Cambrian explosion shows all kinds of life appearing suddenly.
• CC301. Cambrian explosion contradicts evolutionary "tree" pattern.
• CC310. Fossils are dated from strata; strata are dated from fossils.
  We went over this yesterday in my Message 36. Did you understand it, unlit-candle, or did you religiously ignore it?
• CC331. Polystrate fossils indicate massive sudden deposition.
• CC335. A fossil whale was found vertically through several strata.
  This is kind of a funny story. The fossil whale fossil was found in road bed excavation (as I recall) near Lompoc, Calif. The only sources for it that I could find was from a creationist book (which claimed it to be polystrate, standing vertically on its tail/fluke) and from their source, a short blurb in an industrial chemistry journal (I looked it up in the library). Later I learned that it was encased in a single layer of diatomaceous earth which had subsequently been tilted to an angle of about 45 degrees ... and the whale fossil with it.

  ​

  In general, I have found creationists' polystrate fossil claims to be among their worst documented. Almost as if they're trying to hide something.
• CC371. Evidence of blood in a Tyrannosaurus bone indicates recent burial.
• CC371.1. Soft tissues from a Tyrannosaurus bone indicate recent burial.
• CD001. Radiometric dating falsely assumes rocks are closed systems.
• CD002. Radiometric dating falsely assumes initial conditions are known.
• CD004. Cosmic rays and free neutrinos affect U and Ar decay rates.
• CD010. Radiometric dating gives unreliable results.
• CD011. Carbon dating gives inaccurate results.
• CD011.1. Variable C-14/C-12 ratio invalidates C-14 dating.
• CD011.2. Vollosovitch and Dima mammoths yielded inconsistent C-14 dates.
  I suspect that this is what you were talking about in your Message 30 false claim of "In some instances the head and the tail of the same fossils have been dated as much as 20,000 years between." Those samples were taken from two different mammoths, not from the same specimen as per your lie.
• CD011.3. Living snails were C-14 dated at 2,300 and 27,000 years old.
  This was the second creationist claim I was given (the first one was a real doozy of a stinker; see below). It didn't smell right, so I was skeptical, but it was a couple decades before I was able to find a reference to the source. Freshwater clams made their shells out of "old carbon" from the limestone dissolved in the spring's water. It's called the reservoir effect in that the reservoir of C14 that an organism draws from affects the results of radiocarbon dating. The method depends on that reservoir being the atmosphere (and hence animals feeding off of terrestrial plants) to get the most accurate results. Drawing from a reservoir of "old carbon" (ie, the ocean, limestone) throws the results off to looking older.
• CD011.4. A freshly killed seal was C-14 dated at 1,300 years old.
  The reservoir effect again. Only terrestrial plants get their carbon from the atmosphere, while animals get their carbon from their food. If you feed on "fresh carbon" sources like land animals and plants, then your radiocarbon dating results should be accurate. But if you feed on "old carbon" (like in the ocean) then your results will look older than they should. For example, NOVA recently covered an archaeological dig of an enormous Viking encampment in England whose date we know. Dating almost everything at the sites were in line with the known date except the human remains which came up about 200 years too old.
  Then they realized that those humans' diet depended a lot on fish, so taking that into account straightened that "problem" out immediately.
• CD011.6. Ancient coal and oil are C-14 dated as only 50,000 years old.
  This is the issue that you still have not learned. That deep subterranean reservoir of C14 has absolutely nothing to do with the radiocarbon dating method. So this is still a very stupid creationist lie.
• CD012. U-Th dating gives inaccurate results for modern volcanic rocks.
• CD013. K-Ar dating gives inaccurate results for modern volcanic rocks.
• CD013.1. K-Ar dates of 1986 dacite from Mount St. Helens are very old.
• CD014. Isochron dating gives unreliable results.
• CD014.1. Isochron date of young Grand Canyon lava is excessively old.
• CD020. Consistency of radiometric dating comes from selective reporting.
• CD101. Entire geological column does not exist.
• CD102. The geological column is sometimes out of order.
• CD102.1. Out-of-order strata occur at the Lewis Overthrust.
• CD103. The geologic column is based on the assumption of evolution.
• CD200. Uniformitarian assumption is untenable.
• CD210. The mouth of the Colorado River does not have enough sediment for the Grand Canyon.
• CD211. Mississippi delta could have formed in 5,000 years.
• CD220. There is not enough sediment in the ocean for an old earth.
• CD221. Oceans do not have enough dissolved minerals for an old earth.
  One of those dissolved minerals is aluminum. If we were to employ creationism stupidity to determine the age of the earth using aluminum, then the earth would be only 100 years old. In his book, Dr. Henry Morris mentioned that in passing and passed it off with a "gee, I wonder what that could mean."
  Uh, maybe that your claim doesn't work?
• CD221.1. Sodium accumulates in oceans too fast for an old earth.
• CD240. Experiments show that strata can violate principles of superposition.
• CD410. World War II airplanes are now beneath thousands of "annual" ice layers.
• CD501. On an old earth, mountains would have eroded by now.
• CD502. Volcanic mountains are built too fast for an old earth.
• CD510. Folded rocks must have been soft when folded.
• CD610. The erosion rate of Niagara Falls' rim indicates a young earth.
• CD701. The earth's magnetic field is decaying, indicating a young earth.
• CE010. NASA scientists found a day missing.
  This was the second creationist claim that I ever heard (that was in 1970) and it is such a stinker that I immediately wrote off creationist claims as bogus -- a decade later I was surprised that creationism was still around so I started studying it seriously and almost immediately discovered that creationist claims are bogus.

  ​

  Refer to this essay, Thoughts on "Joshua's Long Day", for the complete story. Basically around 1965 somebody published a bogus story of NASA having discovered "Joshua's Lost Day" through a computer program that calculated the moon's position. It imbues computers and computer programs with magical properties that in 1970 (when almost nobody had any access to a computer) I knew they did not have.
  If you Google for this claim, most of the hits will refute it and most of those sites are Christian sites. This claim was also in that Answers in Genesis list of claims that creationists must not use. I was surprised in the late 1980's when my sister-in-law mentioned having just read it in the Sunday newspaper magazine supplement.
• CE011. Earth's rotation is slowing, indicating a young earth.
  Not at the rate at which it's actually slowing down, such that 4 billion (10⁹) years ago one earth rotation would have been 12 hours. Needless to say, the creationists got it all wrong and claim a deceleration rate that is hundreds of times too great.

  ​

  While the original claim was based on a mistake (and misunderstanding of leap seconds), it has been fully incorporated into the creationist mythos such that when you educate a creationist as to his error, he will ignore the truth and continue using the claim (hence engaging in deliberate lying. Read the article, An unsuccessful attempt to correct an error on young-earth creationist websites. (Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 2001) for that story -- their conclusion is that it is virtually impossible to have any kind of meaningful dialogue with creationists. Also refer to my own web page on this topic, DWISE1'S CREATION / EVOLUTION PAGE:
  Earth's Rotation is Slowing.
• CE011.1. The frequency of leap seconds indicates a young earth.
  That "earth's spin is slowing down" claim seems to have originated with Walter Brown in a 1979 brochure. He seems to have dropped it by the 1980's, but

  ​

  BTW, in the last two decades of my career as a software engineer I did design work with devices that used GPS receivers. As a result, I became very familiar with working with leap seconds. But Walter Brown did not understand them, so he came up with a deceleration rate for the earth's rotation that was hundreds of times too great, which in turn messed up with his conclusions. And those messed up conclusions is what creationists live by (and base their faith on) four decades later. Ain't no stupid like a creationist stupid because a creationist stupid is so dumb.
• CE020. An old earth would be covered by 182 feet of meteoric dust.
• CE101. There is not enough moon dust for an old universe.
  I did independent research on this claim, but a couple astronomers published first -- see my page, MOON DUST. At that 1985 creationist debate that Charles and I attended (see my notes above on the bombardier beetle claim), Dr. Henry Morris claimed that a "1976" NASA document ("Well into the Space Age!") showed that there should have been a layer of meteoric dust on the moon 284.8 feet thick, which of course we did not find. I wrote to the ICR for more information and Dr. Duane Gish sent me a letter by Harold Slusher containing the calculations (ie, it wasn't the NASA document that gave that figure, but rather an equation that Slusher had concocted which included two extraneous factors that together inflated his results by a factor of 10,000 (correcting his results yields a dust layer depth of about a third of an inch, which is about what we did find). Slusher's letter also cites a "1976" NASA document ("Well into the Space Age!").

  ​

  But then I found that NASA document in the university library stacks and the instant I looked at the front cover I knew the rest of the story -- ie, creationists lying yet again as they always do. The papers were from an August 1965 astrophysics conference and was printed in 1967.

  ​

  So I wrote back to Gish to warn him of the problem and he deflected and lied about the document's date (even with the xerox'd front page in front of him) and then he ignored all further correspondence. The two astronomers who had written about the same experience though with Henry Morris also got that same treatment. Although a single creationist book subsequently said, "moon dust is unreliable so we don't use it anymore", Morris' book, Scientific Creationism, which contained that false NASA document citation still does, so 30 years later any creationism newbie buying the most recent version of that book will still be deceived by Morris' lie.
• CE110. The moon is receding at a rate too fast for an old universe.
• CE301. The lack of solar neutrinos indicates that the stellar model is wrong.
  This one also made it to Answers in Genesis' "please, creationists, don't use these claims" article. When I took astronomy in the early 70's, this was an actual problem in astrophysics. It turned out that our understanding of neutrinos wasn't quite right in that it turned out that they have extremely little mass, not zero mass, so some of them change to a different kind of neutrino in transit from the sun's core to earth. The problem with creationist claims about this is that it is very out-of-date. No creationist malfeasance here, unless the creationist using the claim is aware of the truth.
• CE310. A shrinking sun indicates a young sun.
  This is the infamous "shrinking sun" claim that is completely bogus, a surefire guarantee of longevity for a creationist claim. Two astronomers, Eddy and Boornazian, had studied solar transit data collected for a 117-year period (1836-1953) at the Royal Observatory. That data turned out to contain systematic errors that led them to a false finding of the sun's diameter contracting at the rate of about 5 feet per hour. When they presented their abstract at a conference, it sparked several studies of other sets of observations which agreed with each other and not with E&B whose article was never published. That should have been it, but their abstract was reported in a physics newsletter and a creationist got hold of it and the "shrinking sun" was born. It is now a creationist stable and it is still completely false. A standard version of the claim gets all the details wrong, naming "Boyle Observatory" and that it used "300 years of data"; if you see those details then you know what you are looking at.

  ​

  BTW, if you plot all the measurements of the sun's diameter over a 300 year period then you get a scatter which centers around a slowly increasing size. That reflects the fact that the sun is slowly increasing in size as its core is slowly heating up -- the rate I've seen is about an inch a year, though the gases at the surface of the sun are about the same density as the earth's atmosphere at 30,000 feet, so the visible disk tends to oscillate in size.

  ​

  Kent Hovind went one step further with his solar mass loss claim intended to bolster the shrinking sun. He took the rate at which the sun "is burning its fuel" (hydrogen fusion in the core, though there is reason to suspect that Hovind thinks it's combustion on the surface), which is about 4.6 million tonnes per second but Hovind uses 5 million tons (close enough). He also uses 5 billion (10⁹) years for the sun's age, which again is a wee bit high but still acceptable. Then he claims that the sun had lost such a huge amount of mass that an ancient sun would have "sucked the earth in." But if you do the math as I had then you realize that the total amount of mass lost, which is astronomical, is insignificant compared with the sun's total mass. As a result, the ancient sun's mass would have been a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's mass, making the ancient sun's gravity a few hundredths of one percent greater which would have "sucked the earth in" by about 60,000 miles. Read my page on it, DWise1: Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim. When I tried to learn more about his claim, Hovind became increasingly beligerent and even tried twice to pick a fight with me over my email name, DWise1, which prompted me to write its very mundane origin story at that link. Hovind's evasive conduct indicated that he knew that his claim was bogus, but then he went off-line for a decade while serving his prison term for federal tax fraud. Now he has bolstered his solar mass loss claim by commanding his audience to never ever do the math! And to never ever listen to anyone who has done the math. Because, of course, the moment you do the math then you know how bogus his claim is. Definitely deliberate dishonesty.
• CE311. The faint young sun paradox contradicts an old earth.
• CE380. Galaxies should lose their spiral shape over millions of years.
• CE410. Physical constants are only assumed constant.
• CE411. The speed of light has changed.
• CE411.1. Physicists found that the speed of light was once faster.
• CE441. Explosions such as the big bang do not produce order or information.
• CF001. The second law of thermodynamics prohibits evolution.
• CF002. Complexity does not come from simplicity.
• CF005. 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to information theory.
• CF010. Cybernetic simulations show that Darwinian processes do not produce order.
• CF011. Evolutionary algorithms smuggle in design in the fitness function.
• CF011.1. The outcome of Dawkins's WEASEL program was prespecified.
  The target string for WEASEL (and my own version, MONKEY, deemed highly true to the original as it should be since I used the book's description as my software specification) is indeed preset (a line of Shakespeare for Dawkins, the alphabet for MONKEY), but that has no bearing whatsoever for the results.
  They compare two different selection methods, single-step selection (SSS) and cumulative selection (CS) as described in Chapter 3 of Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. SSS is abysmally inefficient (you make an attempt and when it fails you start all over again from scratch, whereas CS converges on the goal very quickly (you make a multiple attempts in a population of strings with a single random change in each one, then the one that came closest "fathers" the next population of strings). SSS is the favorite of creationist probability arguments and has absolutely nothing to do with how life works, whereas CS, which was based on how life works, very closely matches how life works. When I analyzed the probabilities, I found that it is virtually impossible for CS to fail -- SSS would require thousands of times the age of the universe in order to have one chance in a million of success, whereas CS would routinely succeed within 30 seconds on an XT running at Norton Factor 2 (on a current post-Pentium box it appears to succeed instantaneously).

  ​

  Of course, creationists have to lie about WEASEL. Dumb ... er, Demski and Royal Truman both use the lie that WEASEL locks in successful letters and doesn't allow them to change ("locking rings"). That is a damned lie! That was not described in the book, so it was not in my software spec, which means that it's not in my MONKEY. Download it and read my source code (original in Pascal, redone into C). If you can find anything even close to any "locking rings" then tell me!
• CF201. Polonium haloes indicate a young earth.
  This was Robert Gentry's false claim. He claimed to have found polonium halos (blemishes in the rock from a decaying atom) in "basement basalt" AKA "Genesis rock" -- the very first rock to have formed. When the site where he collected his sample was visited, it turned out to be an igneous intrusion into metamorphic rock, IOW, just about the furthest thing from "Genesis rock" imaginable. Internet chatter was to the effect that Gentry couldn't recognize igneous rock even if it came up and bit him.

  ​

  In 1980 when Arkansas public schools were required to create a "balanced treatment" creationist curriculum, the teacher with that assignment was at a loss to find anything. The ICR's "public school edition" materials were so very bad as well as being to blatantly religious that they weren't acceptable. One of two sources that that teacher could find was a Readers Digest article on Robert Gentry's polonium halos. If that poor teacher had only known at the time ... .
• CF210. Radiometric dating falsely assumes that rates are constant.