Monday, April 19, 2010

"Young Earth" Battle in the "Amazon"?

Dr. Jellison has been maintaining a long-running series of 'dueling reviews' over the revised version of creationist John Morris' book, "Young Earth",  in the comments section at Amazon.

I mentioned Dr. Jellison's initial review back in January (Review of "The Young Earth" by John Morris).  Since then, some of the discussion has continued in comments to the review and Dr. Jellison has continued to respond.

A few other notes I'll add based the content of the comments so far:

1) The Cosmology Statement (http://www.cosmologystatement.org) signers are a mish-mash of supporters of various alternative cosmologies, ranging from supporters of Steady-State and Plasma cosmology to young-Earth creationists, and other more bizarre personal theories.  The only unifying concept among all the signatories is they disapprove of Big Bang cosmology.  Only a few of the signatories have actually presented cosmological models that can be tested outside of their own imagination.  Those who have presented testable models usually find their model can match a few basic observations but seriously fail on many others (such as shown in Scott Rebuttal. II. The Peratt Galaxy Model vs. the Cosmic Microwave Background).

2) Dr. Jellison is responding to a commenter who claims that their laundry list of cosmological problems could all be solved by just assuming that the Universe is actually young.  This is the classic "God of the Gaps" argument and the list of these "problems" just shrinks into smaller, more obscure sections of science.  Twenty years ago, creationists were arguing that the solar neutrino problem was evidence that the Sun was less than billions of years old, yet that 'unsolvable problem' has since vanished.  I'm reminded of a comment at a talk I attended where it was pointed out that those who argue that the Big Bang can't be correct because we don't understand all the details about how galaxies formed is equivalent to arguing that the Earth can't be round because we don't understand all the details about how tornadoes form.

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