What were they thinking (or not as the case may be)...

Neat article from the New Yorker on the young earth Creationist wrongthink.

Excerpts:

“There’s experimental or observational science, as we call it. That’s using the scientific method, observation, measurement, experiment, testing,” he said during the debate. “When we’re talking about origins, we’re talking about the past. We’re talking about our origins. You weren’t there, you can’t observe that…. When you’re talking about the past, we like to call that origins or historical science.”

In other words, Ham was saying that there is a fundamental difference between what creationists call the “historical sciences”—areas of study, like astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology, that give us information about the early Earth and the evolution of life—and other sciences, like physics and chemistry, which appear to be based on experiments done in the laboratory today.

{...} In the first place, science doesn’t involve merely telling stories about history. If it did, scientific explanations might not have any claim to a higher level of veracity than religious stories. The stories that science does tell have empirical consequences, and make physical predictions that can be tested.


{...} my favorite example: the prediction of a genetic relationship between the great apes and humans via a common ancestor, as taught in many (I wish it were all) introductory biology courses. Humans have twenty-three pairs of chromosomes, where all the great apes have twenty-four pairs. If they have a common ancestor, this difference must be explained. One possibility is that two of the chromosomes in the great apes fused together at some point in the human lineage. But this makes two testable predictions. {...}. If fusion had occurred, then one of the human chromosomes should, in its central region, include the remnants of the two fused telomeres, lined up end to end. It also should have, at between roughly a quarter and three-quarters of the way along the chromosome, a structure identical to that of the centromeres of the great-ape chromosomes. This prediction, tested in the laboratory today, and not in the distant past, has been beautifully verified.



{...} think about geology, another bugaboo of the young-Earth creationists. The phenomenon of plate tectonics and continental drift has transformed the field of geology in the past fifty years. {...} continental drift is measurable today. Moreover, given the measurements and the current shape of continents, one can speculate that, in the distant past, at periods determined by measurements made using modern physics and chemistry, which allow us to model the dynamics of the crust and the mantle of Earth, the currently existing continents were fused together {...} This theory makes predictions, most notably that—like the chromosomes—one will find identical geological structures at the edges of the current continents that were once fused. Guess what has been observed?



{...}let’s consider the particles, called neutrinos, coming from the Sun—one of the great astrophysical observations of the past century. It established directly a fact that is at the basis of stellar astronomy, that the Sun’s power arises from nuclear-fusion reactions at its center. The neutrinos interact so weakly that they make it out of the Sun unimpeded after they are produced. If our ideas about the Sun’s power source are correct, each second of each day, six hundred billion neutrinos are going through each square centimetre of your body, originating from the Sun. {...}The Nobel Prize-winning observation of solar neutrinos—made by Ray Davis and his colleagues over a twenty-year period, starting in the nineteen-sixties—was performed using a mammoth tank of cleaning fluid located deep in a mine in South Dakota {...} has established that our detailed model of the Sun {...} is, essentially, correct.

But there’s the rub. The model uses the very same physics that we test with the neutrino data {...} It implies it takes almost a million years for light to get from the center of the Sun, where the energy is generated in the nuclear reactions, to the outside {...} before it escapes for us to see.  Thus, when we feel the warmth of the light from the Sun on a warm day in the summer, we are doing historical science. And, if the Sun were only six thousand years old, it wouldn’t be shining as it is while I sit here and write this in Phoenix. Nor would it be shining in Petersburg Kentucky, on the Creation Museum and Ken Ham. [/New Yorker]