International Conference on Creationism

Andrew A. Snelling, asnelling@answersingenesis.org

Snelling, A.A. 1998. The Cause of Anomalous Potassium-Argon Ages for Recent Andesite Flows at Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand, and the Implications for Potassium-Argon Dating. In R.E. Walsh (editor), Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 503-526. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.

I remember that I was on an itinerant creation ministry speaking trip around New Zealand back in the mid-1990s and staying in the Taupo area on the central North Island when I had a free day. I had seen from maps and reports that the historic lava flows on the sides on Mt Ngauruhoe could be clearly distinguished, and in my research, I also knew that recent lava flows sometimes gave falsely old K-Ar dates, similar to what Dr. Steve Austin had found at Mount St. Helens. So, in a borrowed vehicle I headed south on the highway, then east on a rough gravel road to near the Ngauruhoe volcano, parked and walked the rest of the way. After a day of trekking and sampling the easily identified historic lava flows, I started back in the car, only to experience a deflated tire. The available spare was one of those small spacer tires, so it was a slow and cautious drive all the way back to our accommodation.

Back home in Brisbane with the andesite samples I had to find a suitable laboratory that would date the samples using the potassium-argon (K-Ar) method without questioning who I was and asking what ages I was expecting. From my contact with colleague Dr. Steve Austin at ICR I chose the Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts because they offered a commercial service and the staff being so distant from my outpost in the Antipodes would not know me. Fortunately, they accepted my samples and payment without question.

Months later the results came. As anticipated, most samples yielded grossly older ages up to 3.5 million years, in contrast to the true ages of 1949, 1954 and 1975. Now came the task of reporting these results and exploring the reasons for them. That involved a literature search. It was well documented as to how extraneous argon would be brought up in the volcanic gases and extruded in the lavas then was trapped in the lavas during their cooling. This is because congealing of the lavas does not allow the relatively heavy argon gas to totally escape. However, being a noble gas, which is chemically inert, the argon atoms are not bonded within the lattices of any of the andesite’s constituent minerals. Nevertheless, during standard potassium-argon dating procedures the argon gas is bled out of the crushed samples and analyzed as though it had been produced by radioactive decay of the potassium in the andesite’s minerals. Then based on that assumption the analytical results are plugged into the potassium-argon model age equation to yield the erroneously old ages.

The outcome was very satisfying. In documenting these problems with potassium-argon dating care had to be taken to be thorough so as cover any angles that opponents would exploit in defending this dating method. However, the fact that erroneously old K-Ar dates for historic lavas was already well known in the literature made that task easier. Of course, that implied that if the K-Ar method produced erroneous dates on historic lavas of known ages due to extraneous or inherited argon, then how could we trust the K-Ar dates obtained for ancient lavas whose true ages were not known. It also opened to me the huge literature on the geochemistry of the mantle sources of magmas that affects all the radioisotope dating of the lavas erupted from them.

This all started a long journey to explore and understand the problems with the radioisotope dating methods and how we explain the grossly old ages that systematically occur in the rock record in the apparent right superpositional order. It soon resulted in me being invited to participate in the very successful, landmark, ICR-led, Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth (RATE) research initiative. And that quest continues to this day, when we have even more reasons to doubt the validity of the vast ages purportedly yielded by the radioisotope dating methods.

The location of Mt Ngauruhoe in the Taupo Volcanic Zone (TVZ), New Zealand, showing the main structural features. The shaded area is the andesite arc, and the inset shows the major components of the boundary between the Australian and Pacific Plates in the New Zealand region (arrows indicate relative motions). Solid triangles are basalt-andesite volcanoes.

Paul A. Garner, paul@biblicalcreationtrust.org

Whitmore, J.H., and P.A. Garner. 2008. Using suites of criteria to recognize pre-Flood, Flood, and post-Flood strata in the rock record with application to Wyoming (USA). In A.A. Snelling (editor), Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Creationism, pp. 425-448. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship; Dallas, Texas: Institute for Creation Research.

This paper had its origins in a conversation that took place in the dining hall of Cedarville University, Ohio, in June 2006. I was attending a meeting of what was then called the Baraminology Study Group (now the Creation Biology Society), when Dr John Whitmore, a geology professor at Cedarville, approached me about an idea he had.

Identifying Flood rocks and distinguishing them from pre-Flood and post-Flood rocks was (and still is!) a complex and thorny issue in creationism. Dr Whitmore wanted to write a paper about this issue, but he wanted to have a European perspective as well. He knew that I was familiar with the geology of Great Britain, that the Flood boundaries question was something I’d thought a lot about, and that my own ideas had changed over time. And so I agreed to be his co-author.

Many different views have been expressed about the Flood boundaries problem over the years. Our approach was to offer a model based on the application of multiple criteria; we proposed 28 in all. However, we recognized that some criteria were more diagnostic than others and so we ranked how important we thought each criterion was within a Flood model. We discussed each criterion and sought to justify our rankings. We also identified on a chart (below) how important we thought each criterion would have been at different times in the earth’s history (before, during and after the Flood).

For example, in rocks deposited during the Flood we would expect to see marine sediments of unparalleled extent, associated with the mass death and burial of whole populations of organisms. But we wouldn’t expect to find glacial deposits or desert deposits in Flood rocks; these are the kinds of rocks we’d expect to find after the Flood. In other words, different types of processes would have predominated at different times in earth’s history, and these processes would have left distinctive signatures in the rock record. By applying many such criteria (rather than one or a few) we hoped to be able to identify these different episodes of earth history in the rock record with a greater level of confidence.

We applied our model to the rock succession in Wyoming, a region of the US that Dr Whitmore knew well. In Wyoming, a thick series of mostly marine sedimentary rocks rests on an eroded basement of crystalline igneous and metamorphic rocks. This entire sedimentary sequence was subsequently faulted, folded and eroded, and some relatively thin, flat-lying sediments occur within basins on top. Above these basinal deposits there are some glacial and volcanic deposits.

Applying our criteria to this section we concluded that the Flood/post-Flood boundary was most likely around the Cretaceous-Paleogene, after the thick marine layers had been deposited but before the basinal sediments were laid down. This was a significant conclusion for me personally, because in some earlier papers I had placed the Flood/post-Flood boundary much lower in the rock record. But my ideas had been changing and the publication of this paper formally documented my change of view (p. 436).

So far as I’m aware no one has yet applied our multiple criteria model to other regions of North America or to other parts of the world, so there’s much that an enterprising creationist geologist could do! There’s also scope for others to add to our list of criteria and to debate our rankings, as well as to work out what our model means for the interpretation of radiometric dates and fossil zonation. The Flood boundary problem continues to be discussed in the literature, with few signs of an emerging consensus. We still think our model could help to resolve some of the outstanding questions.

The 28 criteria used to define Flood boundaries in Whitmore and Garner (2008). The thickness of a line indicates the relative importance of a particular process during a time period. The number following each criterion is a rank of how important we feel each criterion is within a Flood model (1 being the highest).

Brian Thomas, bthomas@icr.org

Thomas, B. 2013. A Review of Original Tissue Fossils and Their Age Implications. In M. Horstemeyer, (editor), Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Creationism, [no page numbers]. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Creation Science Fellowship.

My work at the Institute for Creation Research beginning in 2008 afforded me the latitude to select science news stories that elevate our perspective of Genesis as history. Thus, before too long I had accumulated dozens of technical reports of biochemical remnants original to fossils including dinosaur bones.

Most folks intuit that dinosaur blood vessels and bone proteins seem young, but I wanted more objective evidence. I eventually found biochemical decay rate measurements in archaeology journals instead of in the paleontology journals that published the tissue remnants. By 2011, I felt ready to assemble an empirical case for the Flood’s timing of fossils that formed thousands, not millions of years ago.

My initial ICC draft was horrible. Fortunately, I had Dr. Steve Austin as my ICC area editor. He felt that my table of about 40 original biochemical fossil papers was worth publishing if I could contribute something original to the field. So, I did. The result was this 2013 ICC paper. It summarized much of the vertebrate-specific proteins and nucleic acids that researchers have described in fossils. My report critiqued a preservation-by-clay-minerals hypothesis. I argued that the same water that would have ensconced clay next to lizard skin to supposedly hold the skin in place should instead have facilitated the chemistry that accelerates tissue decay. After 40 million supposed years, the skin should be long gone. But it remains in rock, keratin scales and all.

Today, that 2013 list of 40-odd papers has grown beyond 100. We curate that list in an online document. These additional reports extended the occurrences of original organics to almost every continent. The reports have stacked fossil proteins onto not just a few, but most geologic Systems, including Precambrian strata. A worldwide effect implies a worldwide cause.

In addition to the clay minerals idea, two new preservation hypotheses have emerged since 2013. We summarized them in our 2019 paper, Proteomes of the Past, published in Expert Review of Proteomics. We there concluded that secular attempts to make biomolecular remnants orders of magnitude older than measured decay rates permit all import new problems. The tissue mystery remains unsolved within the demands of secular history.

Experiments and discoveries have overall strengthened our 2013 conclusions. This ICC paper remains a helpful introduction to paleobiochemistry and an encouragement to those willing to see how well Noah’s Flood explains dinosaur and other fossil proteins.

Figure presented at the 2020 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology 80^th Annual Meeting. Poster title “Cross-Polarization and Second Harmonic Generation Imaging Reveal Bone Collagen Decay Patterns in Four Fossils.” Rainbow colored regions show collagen-generated birefringence under cross-polarized and red-filtered light microscopy in a cross-section of a Permian Eryops megacephalus forelimb. Scale bar 50 microns.