I started writing a response to Andrew Sandstrom’s comment here to my article about Kent Hovind, and it turned into a bit of a rant. You’ll need to read what he says to get the context, I’m not going to quote him here in full.
“The Big Bang doesn’t support evolution… But there’s an interpretation on how the big bang happened by many prominent Darwinists.” – Well, you’re right that there’s a lot of crossover between acceptance of evolution and of Big Bang theory, and certainly most Darwinists more or less accept the current model of the origins of the Universe, as do most scientists of any kind, even if it’s not their area of study. But it’s not that there’s absolutely no connection between the different ideas.
The approximate age of the Universe has been calculated entirely independently of anyone else’s forming hypotheses about the origins of life on Earth, but the two fields produce results which seem to support each other. Cosmology and astronomy indicate that the Universe began around 13.7 billion years ago, expanded rapidly, matter coalesced into stars and planets, and Earth’s own history stretches back around 4.5 billion years – and evolutionary theory describes the history of developing life on this planet, on an independently formulated timescale which lines up nicely with our cosmological ideas.
This wasn’t always true – some doubt was cast on Darwin’s theory when he first proposed it, because the Earth wasn’t thought to be old enough to allow for such levels of development as evolution required. But doubt was also cast on Lord Kelvin’s estimates of the age of the Earth (initially said to be 20-400 million years), more observations were made, new methods were devised, and we’re much closer now to a more consistent and accurate understanding, backed up by many different fields of study.
“A group of fossils deep in the earth’s crust…” – Could be interpreted (or interpretated, if you prefer) in either of the ways you mention, as long as you’re not actually doing any science, and aren’t going to examine anything in any more detail than to notice that there’s “a group of fossils deep in the earth’s crust”. At that level of precision, maybe they’re creatures living a long long time ago, maybe they’re animals who were too stupid or slow to find high ground before the flood, or maybe they’re remnants of a jigsaw puzzle that some Martians got bored with and left scattered around the planet before humans got here.
Thing is, millions of pages of research and data have been published, in journals of geology and such, so we actually know quite a lot more detail about the fossil record of the Earth than just that it’s “a group of fossils deep in the earth’s crust”, and the two latter explanations on that list have been largely dismissed, because they fail to fit any significant amount of the evidence.
“When all of the dating methods are very inaccurate…” – Um, no. I lack the inclination, the capacity, the background knowledge, and the time to conclusively demonstrate the validity of scientific dating methods in a single post, but this is another area of science in which numerous results converge from different directions to produce a convincing level of certainty, and in which new results are predicted successfully time and again. There are obviously limitations, which need to be understood if the results of using these methods are to be valid, but these have generally been found and highlighted by other scientists, refining the tools of research, rejecting and falsifying anything which can be undermined by the facts. My next Skeptictionary post will be about the basics of radiometric dating, and I should make a few follow-ups at some point to address some of the common criticisms.
“Evolution is a speculation and interpretation of the evidence.” – This is clearly meant to imply that any other interpretations might make just as good a fit, but that’s not really how evidence works. Evolution has, for a long time, explained the vast majority of the known data, and been able to make testable predictions of future discoveries and measurements, better than any other model.
The history of science is a history of contradictory evidence being brought forth, examined, tested, poked, prodded, and eventually either being discarded as misleading or invalid, being accepted and assimilated into a modified and improved understanding, or occasionally gathering enough momentum – through repeated experiments constantly confirming it, and by withstanding all efforts to knock it down – and overturning a previous way of thinking. This is just as true of the science of measuring the age of the Earth; it’s developed fascinatingly over time, as new theories have trumped old simply by better fitting the observed facts, and in recent years a concensus has grown regarding the broad truth that the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. As much as you might like there to be, there’s no kind of conspiracy keeping young-Earth ideas out of science. There doesn’t need to be; people are just following the actual weight of the evidence.
I’m not at all sure what your point is in linking to that NASA story. It’s one of many, many, many examples of scientists discovering something they don’t currently have an obvious explanation for, and beginning to wonder how it will affect their theories, and whether it means they’ve been wrong about something. The people who made this observation, and understood what it implies, were astronomers – not Creationists, not advocates of some minority position trying to bring down any current consensus, but scientists working within the field whose theories are being shaken up.
They say that this observation is “not what the models predict”, and once some more information is gathered, they’re going to have to start adapting their theory to make sense of it. (Since the story’s over five years old, maybe I should try and find out if they’ve done that by now, and in what ways.) This is just how science works. Nothing about the discovery of a string of galaxies 300 million light years long does anything to support any kind of Creationism, or to undermine evolution, or to confirm or deny any predictions made by any outside-the-box thinking “scientist” like Kent Hovind.
“[Evolution] really can’t go past the theory stage…” – Please to be learning what a theory is. Evolution is as much of a fact as gravity.
