>Having watched this thread without getting involved it is now going to the
>stage of urban myth. I finally walked the 25 feet to my library and got Scott
>Huse's book The Collapse of Evolution and Tom Barnes, Impact #110.
Dang, you beat me to it. I went out and bought Huse's book today and
dug out my Impacts, too.
>First, Neither Huse nor Barnes give the 5.6 cm/year figure. That figure was
>given by Alan Feuerbach who does not believe that the moon's recession
>presents a problem for evolutionists (unless you have changed, Alan, since we
>last exchanged e-mails about 3 years ago.)
Nope.
>He merely states it and cites the wrong page (page 4 instead of page 1 or 2)
>of Barnes' 1982 impact article.
Not only that, but Huse's previous "argument", that the earth's rotation
slowing down proves a young earth, cites the wrong page of the reference.
The reference is to Randy Wysong's _The Creation-Evolution Controversy_
(Inquiry Press, 1976, pp. 164-6). And guess what? Wysong took his
argument from Thomas Barnes, referencing the ICR's _Acts and Facts_,
3 (July-August, 1974). Of course, Wysong gave no values or calculations
either.
In the No. 110 _Impact_ article Barnes referenced his earlier article
in _Impact_ No. 16, which summarized several of Lord Kelvin's
calculations on the age of the earth. But Barnes failed to realize
that quoting Lord Kelvin on the age of the earth is like quoting him
on the completeness of Newtonian physics -- he simply didn't have all
the data to make correct conclusions. Furthermore, Kelvin was more
than a bit arrogant. He once calculated that powered flight was not
possible. In 1895 he said that he thought scientists such as himself
had pretty well wrapped up all there was to know about the world.
Later that year, of course, radioactivity was discovered, laying the
foundation for the transition to quantum physics and giving Kelvin a
bit of egg to clean up.
Anyway, Barnes nowhere gives any calculations in the _Impact_ articles,
and I bet he doesn't in the _Acts and Facts_ article either.
This brings up an interesting trend among young-earth creationist
authors. They seem to quote each other without ever checking each
other's calculations or arguments. Here we have Huse referencing
Wysong and Barnes, Wysong referencing Barnes, and Barnes referencing
the 19th century physicist Lord Kelvin. It appears that young-earth
creationism rests solidly on 19th century knowledge.
This reminds me of a similar incident. An evangelical friend told me
that the "long day of Joshua" could be astronomically proven because
there was one day missing from chronology, as confirmed by eclipses.
I was not clear exactly what a "missing day" is, nor how one would
find it, but I asked how she knew that. She referred me to Gleason
Archer's _Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties_. It turned out that
this book referenced earlier apologetic books, which referenced earlier
ones yet, all the way back to _Joshua's Long Day_ by a Yale military
science instructor named Charles A. L. Totten. Of course, all of the
intermediate books gave no calculations at all, but referred back to
the previous one, assuming the earlier author, unlike himself, had
done his homework. Well guess what? Totten gave no details of his
calculation either, telling the reader that he wouldn't burden him
with such tedious details. So various Bible apologists have been
taking the word of a single man for some 100 years, who never graced
the world with the reasons for his word. Interestingly, he states
that the basis for his finding a missing day in chronology could be
found in a British magazine called the _Journal of Biblical Chronology_,
from which he concluded that the earth was created on a particular day
in exactly 4000 B.C.
Alan