Kainoa+B’s+2017+OpEd+Article

= Creationism is NOT Science =



If I were to try to explain creationism in as few words as possible with respect to science, I would simply say that “creationism is not science”

Rather than support and advocate for the scientific scope as a whole, as Foothill already does a splendid job of preparing students for real life scientific careers, I will deconstruct for you a sample of the best attempts creationism as made to reconcile their dying theory. Real science will speak for itself inherently, and besides, there are plenty of educated individuals who are far more qualified than myself to represent the scientific field.

Creationism in it of itself should not constitute its immediate downfall, just as no other religion deserves to be expunged merely on the premise of being false or unfavorable. It is not enough that people conjecture the idea of the young Earth model in spite of the vast majority of scientists (and general public) from all fields of study concurring its fabrication, it is the amount of personified ignorance being fumigated into scientific literature that attempts to be taken seriously as “scientific” research. There have been few notable creationist scientists who have attempted to tackle the theory of evolution, the big bang, the geometric model of the universe, etc. and have fallen flat in their endeavors whether they’re conscious of it or not.



Let’s take for example Russell Humphreys, a creationist physicist who’s earned a Bachelor of Science from Duke University and a Ph. D in physics from Louisiana State University in 1972. Since we’re trying to debunk the absurdity of “creationist science” here, I believe there is no better candidate to discredit than the last best hope for creationists on Earth, by which I mean the creationist with the most reasonable scientific education by modern standards. Some may say that he is the pinnacle of the creationist food chain, the top of the pack if you will.

In 2006, at Sandia National Labs, Russell Humphreys discussed the cosmological phenomenon of comets with regards to the age of the solar system. He stated that, according to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, which is approximately five billion years old. However, when comets pass by the sun, they lose so much of their mass, they could not possibly live any longer than 100,000 years; the typical age of comets were only found to be under 10,000 years old. Humphreys considered the theory of the Kuiper Belt just outside the orbit of Pluto, which theoretically supplied the majority of comets we see inside our solar system and accounts for the abnormally young age of comets, but he dually noted that the existence of such a celestial structure has not been sufficiently observed nor plausibly calculated. He therefore claimed, by corollary, that upper bound for the age of our solar system should be 100,000 years old, according to a comets maximum lifespan.



However, not too long after his claim, Humphreys comet theory came crumbling down like a shattering wine bottle when several teams of astronomers actually photographed and confirmed the Kuiper Belt, as predicted by Gerard Kuiper in 1951. In response, Humphreys has simply dismissed any observations and unsuccessfully attempted to rebut the Kuiper Belt by arguing that even if such a belt existed, it would need to be supplied by another unproven astronomical body called the Oort Cloud, or else, the Kuiper Belt would run out within only a few million years. However, as Dave Thomas pointed out, the Kuiper Belt contains such a surplus of planetesimals rocks left over from the creation of the solar system, numbering in the hundreds of millions, that the Kuiper Belt could actually be feeding the distant Oort Cloud.

In a different discussion with Dr. John Baumgardner, Humphreys talks about a study that observed unusual redshift quantization of galaxies measured from Earth when canceling out the motion of our own galaxy with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation of the universe. To briefly summarize what redshift is, the greater the distance an object that emits light or electromagnetic radiation is from you, the more “red” it appears, because the expansion of space will also expand the wavelength of light, hence promptly named “redshift”. Therefore, by Hubble’s law, we can measure the distance from us to distant galaxies by observing their redshift. When Humphreys mentions “redshift quantization”, it means we are seeing galaxies bundled at specific distances from our Earth, as if to form concentric spheres of galaxies around our own, which Humphreys argued as evidence for geocentricism.



The study Humphreys is referring to is the study done by William Tift in 1973, which discussed whether the redshift of galaxies periodically converged along discrete values. Humphreys stated that “by about 1997 the data was extremely clear and nobody was denying the bunching of redshifts.” But this was a gross over estimate by Humphreys of the acceptance of the theory. For example, in 1987, Sepulveda published a study called the “Geometric Paradigm Accounts for All Redshift Periodicities” to the bulletin of the American Astronomical Society stating that these apparent redshifts were the result of extensive geometric irregularities and the clustering of galaxies. Another study by Tang and Zhang published in 2005 to the Astrophysical Journal stated that there was no evidence for redshift quantization, and a similar study in 2002 conducted by Hawkins, Maddox, and Merrifield found quote, “no evidence for a periodicity at the predicted frequency in log(1+z), or at any other frequency.” There have only been four studies that supported the quantized redshift, and yet, as aforementioned by the previous studies, these studies have been shown to be unreliable. In Hawkins’s experiment, with the help of improving technology to measure redshifts and account for more data points, worked with a much larger sample size compared to Napier, 8 times as many galaxies, which made them less susceptible to statistical error. Hawkins’s paper stated that “given that there are almost eight times as many data points in this sample as in the previous analysis by Burbidge and Napier (2001) [The most recent study supporting redshift quantization.], we must conclude that the previous detection of a periodic signal arose from the combination of noise and the effects of the window function.” In other words, the observation of quantized redshifts is due to statistical error.

I could go on and on about the ridiculous pseudoscience that Humphreys engages in and his increasing support for theories that have long since been disproved or unfounded, but I believe that I’ve made my point quite clear. Humphreys, one of the most well established physicist within the creationist community and the leading advocate for creationist science, is a failed scientist by modern standards. Many creationists, not just Humphreys, have made the same poor arguments with the same logical or informal fallacies but to a lesser degree of sophistication or ethos than Humphreys’ claims, if you could even call him credible at all. Perhaps one of the most common fallacies amongst the creationists, as evoked by Humphreys in his comet argument, is extracting gaps or questions that science has not yet answered and using that as an alibi to dismiss a scientific theory all together. But this could be no further from the truth. Pointing to insufficient knowledge of a particular aspect of a theory does not constitute its abandonment, nor does it constitute affirmation of other theories, especially not young Earth creationism. Again, I could go on and on about the list of fallacies and misrepresentations of science creationism uses to inflate their political agenda. The Ph. D they flounder around to bolster the credibility of their institution only serves to further the deepening ignorance of their followers. There is a reason why no creationist scientist has ever published a study in a respectable journal with regards to defending creationism because there is no evidence supporting creationism because creationism is not science.