Thousands...Not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution
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DVD: Region Code 0Product features:
- Format: DVD/NTSC/Color/Stereo
- Encoding: Region Free
- Language: English
- Studio: ICR - 2005
- Length: 48 minutes
DVD Reviews of Thousands...Not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution
DVD Review: Clutching at Straws
Summary: 1 Stars
In writing this review I'm betraying the memory of my dear old dad, God bless him. Not because he forbade me to comment upon Creationist dogma, but because he always insisted that when someone came up with a contentious viewpoint, the best course of action was to listen to what he had to say in full, and then go away and think about it before commenting myself.
This principle has served me well, up to now. I have to admit that I only managed to get half way through this pitiful DVD (loaned to me by a colleague) before making up my mind about it (I did try, Dad, honestly, before letting you down). But, let you down I must, because I'm sure that you yourself wouldn't have wanted me to waste two minutes of my life, let alone another twenty-two, on this rubbish.
So why is it so bad? Well, Thousands not Billions puts its cards on the table right at the outset: it's already made up its own mind that Scripture and Science are incompatible, because to admit to the latter would (in its own view, I hasten to add) invalidate the Biblical story of the Creation and hence the idea that every death occurred as a result of Original Sin. There is a logic there, but it then immediately tramples underfoot logic, evidence, objectivity and all those other qualities deemed desirable if not downright essential to scientific enquiry in its attempt to prove its own thesis.
Let's have a look at some of this reasoning, shall we? TnB believes that the radiological dating of the Earth is fundamentally flawed, in that it is plausible that the rate of radioactive decay may have slowed down drastically since the birth of the planet. This would necessarily call into question the established means of dating rocks by comparing concentrations of radioisotopes and their decay products. To support this argument, TnB argues that isochron dating is unreliable because of the discrepancies in the ages that different methods yield. However, these ages all average out in the billions of years, not thousands. TnB seems to have deliberately chosen `outlier' ages as representative of isochron dating as a whole, and then says that this bolsters their conception of the Earth being a lot younger than evidence would suggest. This is rather like a detective who, after being given varying height descriptions of a suspect, immediately goes on to conclude that they are seeking a dwarf.
Not content with displaying reasoning with flaws so huge you could drive a double-decker bus through them, TnB goes on to show how Creation Science can be equally as blinkered in other ways. TnB looks at the `evidence' for radioactive decay rates being much higher in the past than they were in the present day. Such evidence would call into question radio-dating in its entirety. To prove its point, it claims that the concentration of helium in naturally-occurring zircon crystals is much higher than would be expected given helium's propensity for diffusion. As helium could only be generated within a crystal by alpha decay, TnB claims that the decay process has been accelerated to balance diffusive loss.
At this particular point, I decided it was time to take stock, so I did some searching on the Internet to see if there were any alternative perspectives on the experimental data. Hardly surprisingly I found a great deal of disagreement with TnB's interpretation. Firstly, the supposedly rapid diffusion rates for helium were obtained by doing measurements under vacuum, not atmospheric pressure. Moreover, no control measurements were taken, such as measuring the concentration of helium-3 in the crystals. Helium-3 is not produced by radioactive decay so an appreciable concentration would have shown that contamination and not radioactive decay was responsible for the high concentration of both helium isotopes.
I suspected the DVD would continue in the same vein of sloppy reasoning and wishful thinking which, if you believe critical reviews, it does. There is a whole section devoted to `polonium halos', radioactive scars left in rocks supposedly by the decay of the short lived element polonium. Of course, there is no evidence presented that long-lived radioactive elements such as uranium or thorium could not have created such haloes, or that these scars are in fact caused by alpha decay exclusively. The first job of any scientist advancing a very contentious hypothesis is to try to find ways to knock that hypothesis down. This production seems to go out of its way to avoid doing just that, even when such ways are in plain view.
Admittedly it's a slick production, masquerading as dispassionate scientific enquiry, but it's anything but. This is `science' for creationists, climate change deniers, in fact all those people who would rather that the Universe was other than it actually is. People who prefer to be told how to think rather than actually developing critical reasoning skills for themselves. People who seek to modify scientific evidence in light of their views, rather than doing the reverse. Tail, meet Dog.
Mercifully, Creation Science has yet to take root in the UK, where I am based, and I hang onto the hope that our education system proves robust enough to stop it from so doing. Right at the beginning of `The Selfish Gene' Richard Dawkins points out that the first question that an alien race encountering humanity will ask themselves, in measuring our development as a species, is `do they believe in evolution?' In other words, `have they figured out where they come from?' If you're wondering why the strange lights have stopped appearing in American skies in recent years, this DVD will provide the answer.
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Description of Thousands...Not Billions: Challenging the Icon of Evolution
Radiometric dating is one of the linchpins of evolutionary education today. Dr. Don DeYoung shatters this and other dating methods employed by evolutionists to cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible and its chronology of earth history. Evolutionists seek to undermine faith in Genesis as the true documentary of the history of the universe. When people are told that a dinosaur bone has been determined to be tens of millions of years old, that obviously doesn't square with the biblical record of man being created on Day 6 with the land animals. But DeYoung now demonstrates that Christians no longer have to puzzle over this glaring contradiction.Bestsellers in DVD
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