The same Creationists who approve of the Fine Tuning argument also use the "Constant decay assumption" argument. Ken Ham espoused this argument in his recent debate against Bill Nye the Science Guy which I linked to in my previous post. He pushed it as "historical science vs. observational science" but it's really the same thing - asserting that science didn't used to work like it does now. However, this dual-pronged approach is utterly incoherent and fallacious.
Central to the Fine Tuning argument is the idea that the Universe's fundamental physical constants have had their values finely tuned by a deity in order to create the correct conditions for life. These are such things as the fine-structure constant of electromagnetic interactions. But we don't know what different values for these Universal constants are even possible. Victor J. Stenger is a prominent physicist who has written extensively on fine tuning. You may want to look at his book "The Fallacy of Fine Tuning".
There is nothing logically preventing any fundamental physical constants being different, but it would change the laws of Physics in fundamental ways, so is very difficult to predict. It may be that different values of the Universal constants lead to an unstable framework which is too short-lived to produce life.
Additionally, we don't know how large a range of values the Universal constants could adopt. There is no real evidence to support the idea that "they could be almost any figure and the fact that they are as they are and have produced life is evidence for God". It may be that changing the values simply means that other, very different forms of life would have been created. It may also be that the current values are near the centre of a bell-curve (or similar) of values that are interdependent on one another. When you alter one, another changes also. But no, the religious apologist insists that the constants could have been any value but were fine-tuned by God to their current levels.
The "constant -decay assumption" argument that Ken Ham espouses, states that we do not know that the rates of nuclear decay were always constant. However, this is pretty unreasonable - the decay constants have not changed in the experience of humankind, and there is no obvious way in which they even could change.
1) It is not clear to me that the decay constants, once established, even COULD change in principle
2) Creationists have posited no valid mechanism for how the constants WOULD change if their argument was correct
There is one way that I can think of that would definitely give a change in the rates of nuclear decay. It is about the only possible way to achieve it (that I can think of). This is by changing the values of the Universal physical constants discussed above!
Notice that changing the Universal physical constants AFTER the Universe has been created, giving a stable world, also means by extension, that it would have been theoretically possible for the Universe to have adopted these changed values from the start. This is because they also lead to a relatively stable Universe.
So by the Creationists' own admission, we now know of at least 2 different values for the Universal physical constants, and they no longer seem so "fine-tuned". Therefore, these two arguments are internally inconsistent. Accordingly, I would prefer to dismiss them both without much further thought.
Here's another one...
ReplyDeleteCreationists use the arguments that "The earth has only been around for several thousand years, not billions of years, so there has not been enough time for the evolution of all the species on the planet to take place. And even if there were billions of years, you could never get germs-to-man evolution because the mathematical improbability of getting complex organisms by mere random processes in even trillions of years."
But then creationists also use the following argument (which is in their way of using pseudoscience to try to deal with the religious myth of the worldwide flood of Noah): "Noah did not need to take millions of species on the ark, because he only needed to take one representative species from each 'created kind' [bara'min], and then after the flood they evolved to the species we have today, but this is not germs-to-man evolution because organisms can only evolve with limits, within the limits of the 'created kinds' [bara'min] that God created."
The incoherence is how in one context they pretend there is not enough time for the evolution of species to occur, yet in the other context they actually use a scheme in which the evolution of millions of species takes place *in less than 4,300 years* (since the time of Noah's Flood).
This is just another example of the fact that creationist arguments have nothing to do with actual science and nothing to do with rational analysis of empirical data but are merely rhetorical arguments fabricated in different contexts all for the purpose of trying to make excuses for various religious stories (and religious doctrines built on them) which are unscientific, regardless of whether or not the arguments actually have anything to do with reality and so, thus, regardless of whether or not they are even logically consistent with each other.
Thank you for your input Steve. I have also noticed other inconsistencies surrounding creationist thought as well, but just felt like picking up on this particular one, as I'd not heard it mentioned.
ReplyDeleteI do tend to agree with your analysis. You make a good point in mentioning the way that creationist / ID advocates conceptualise the issues in the wrong way. Saying things like like "evolution is a completely random process" "amount of information has decreased" and "increasing order is not possible" are more red herrings than problems, which misrepresent the way evolution works.
Of course another problem that creationists can't answer for their 6-10 thousand year old Earth, is why we are not all cooking right now from rampant volcanism or decaying radionuclides which would still be kicking out loads of heat after that amount of time.
Can I ask how you came across this blog? Thanks for your comments by the way, they are much appreciated.