Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Dinosaurs Co-existed with Man and Rode on the Ark with Noah

Bob is a young earth creationist (YEC) who believes in a literal interpretation of the Genesis story. The only way to correlate Genesis and the fact that you can go to the Field Museum and see assembled bones of a dinosaurs is to rationalize that man and dinosaurs co-existed.

When Bob gets on one of his YEC rants, he likes to rattle off a laundry list of so-called "proof" that dinosaurs didn't die out millions of years ago, but rather thousands of years ago. One rant goes something like this: A "creation scientist" sent some dinosaur bone fragments to the University of Arizona for carbon-14 testing; the "creation scientist" didn't tell the folks at Arizona that these were dinosaur bones, because then they wouldn't agree to test them (y'know, cause mainstream scientists are all in on the "conspiracy" to suppress the "truth"); Arizona performs the test and finds that the samples are only about 10,000 years old and sends a letter back to the "creation scientist"; therefore, evolution is a lie. Bob always likes to mention that he has this letter from Arizona right in front of him. (I'm pretty sure that this is the letter Bob is referring to.)

Unfortunately (for Bob) this whole story has been debunked long ago. Bradley Lepper, an Archaeologist with the Ohio Historical Society wrote a research paper detailing the intentional deception of these "creation scientists." Here's the Cliffs Notes version: "[t]he so-called “dates” [provided by Arizona] are meaningless numbers which give the age of a mixture of organic detritus and preservatives which contaminated the fossils. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the age of any dinosaurs."

There's a Roman legal principal that goes falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus (false in one thing, false in everything). Basically, if someone willfully falsifies one matter, then they're not credible in any matter. This fits Bob to a tee.