Maggie McKee at Nature.com has an interesting piece on the difficulties
that a number of recent scientific discoveries pose for uniformitarians,
several of them related to study of the planet Saturn.
For instance, Saturn’s rings, which are 90% water ice,
should be darker than they are if they were actually formed 4 billion
years ago as originally assumed. Comets and asteroids shed dust that in theory
ought to darken the rings over time. So the rings are either younger than
previously thought, or … something.
Titan’s methane atmosphere and its effects on the moon’s
landscape ought to be short-lived, since methane is degraded by sunlight.
Either some unknown process replenishes what the sun destroys, or Titan is also
younger than previously thought.
Uniformitarian observers presume that what they see now has
been going on in precisely the same way for billions of years and can be
expected to continue doing so. If the universe is billions of years old, the
statistical unlikeliness of encountering one of these sorts of scientific
oddities is very high indeed. The odds of humans simultaneously observing
numerous such peculiarities is far enough off the charts to, in McKee’s words, “make
planetary researchers uncomfortable”.
Jeff Moore, a planetary scientist at the NASA Ames Research
Center in California, who presumably subscribes to the theory of
uniformitarianism himself, says, “Geologists like things to be the same as they
ever were,” and that the view is “philosophically comforting
because you don’t have to assume you’re living in special times”.
Or accountable to a deity. But since the human conscience is probably not Mr. Moore’s primary area of expertise, we won’t carp at him for ignoring that aspect of things.
Naturally Moore’s (and McKee’s) honesty has not escaped the attention
of Christian bloggers. The editor of Creation-Evolution
Headlines has obviously read a lot of this stuff and sums it up quite a bit
better than I might:
“It’s not complicated at all, if you subtract out the needless billions of years.
Here’s a classic case of ad hoc explanation to force observations into a web of belief. (This is called ‘special pleading’ in logic.) If science were about honestly following the evidence where it leads, these scientists would have to conclude that the solar system is much younger than thought.
If Saturn’s rings, Enceladus, Io and Titan were the only problem worlds, they might have hope to rescue their beliefs someday. Unfortunately, the problems mount for uniformitarianism when one considers Mercury, Venus, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, Uranus and its moons and rings, Neptune and its moons and rings, Pluto and the trans-Neptunian objects, comets, asteroids, dust — the whole system. There is hardly any planet or moon that met their uniformitarian expectations. We call on them: please, dump the assumption of billions of years, and all these things will start making sense. We do this out of sympathy for their discomfort, wishing them to sleep well for once.”
No comments :
Post a Comment