My Blog posts attract comment from social media. The other day a skeptic revealed himself in a particularly offensive way. He was commenting on an article by a good friend of mine, Dr Carl Wieland, who was CEO of Creation.com Dr Carl some years ago wrote a very interesting article about a squadron of P 38 Lightnings that crashed in Greenland. https://creation.com/the-lost-squadron

This individual called Dr Wieland a liar. I was able to bring this to the attention of the current CEO of Creation.com, Dr Don Batten who contacted the (now retired), Dr. Carl Wieland. The whole article is about the fact that the aircraft (I am very interested in aircraft history) were buried to a great depth of about 75 metres in just 50 years. A great surprise for those who believe in an earth millions of years old.

Dr Don Batten takes up the story after the social media critic had accused Dr Wieland of lying. (I have referred to the person as “the critic” and will not name the social media site. Israel Folau has proved that “inclusive” does not mean Believers in Christianity!).

‘Accusing someone of lying is the refuge of scoundrels, and suggests a ‘rattled cage’, wherein the accuser lacks a reasoned and civilized argument. Note the following response to a similar argument (without the accusation of lying):

“ The critic then claims that Wieland’s analysis of the lost squadron of planes buried below 250 feet of ice in 50 years was offered as proof against the uniformitarian dating of the Greenland ice cores. Wieland was using this example to show that it does not take a vast amount of time to lay down thick layers of ice. The critic correctly points out that the southeast corner of the Greenland Ice Sheet is a relatively warm area with very high snowfall. However, this situation shows that with a different climate regime during the Ice Age with no sea ice and a warm ocean, the rapid development of the Greenland Ice Sheet can occur. Of course, the snowfall rate is much less at the top of the high ice sheet today. However, even at the current average snowfall for the whole Greenland Ice Sheet, it still would take only 5,000 years to deposit all the ice.” (from: https://creation.com/cold-comfort-for-long-agers). [Note that two of the authors have researched the Greenland ice cores in detail and written numerous articles about all aspects thereof ].

So, even allowing for the critics point, that the aircraft were buried in a different part of Greenland where the current precipitation is higher than where the ice cores were taken, it does nothing to validate the over 100,000 years of ice core dating; quite the contrary, and his complaint is moot. As I said, when you have no substantive argument, accuse of lying. A good smokescreen if you can get away with it!

The critic also accused Dr Wieland of lying as follows:

“He *ignored* the ways the ages of the Ice Cores were confirmed and tested. In short, objectively, he lied by ommission [sic] often and transparently.”

No, he did not. Note that footnote #2 in Dr Wieland’s article referenced the following:

1. Several prominent ‘old-earth Christians’ have challenged the Bible’s account of a recent creation on the basis of such ice-core dating. However, work by creationist scientists such as Dr Larry Vardiman of the Institute for Creation Research has shown that the assumptions involved are far from watertight and that the ice-core results may be understood within a young-earth framework. See his articles hyperlinked in Q&A: Ice Age. Return to text.

That’s a funny way of hiding something from the reader; actually drawing attention to the issue!”

This monkey, facing the possibility of evolving into a human being, is vitally interested in such things, because it is an indication the the Bible can be trusted as Historical fact. Thus I was thrilled that Dr Wieland interrupted his well deserved retirement, to answer this angry critic as follows below.

Dr Wieland writes:

Someone made me aware, in my retirement, of B**** D***’s comments on my 1997 magazine article on the website of Creation Ministries International (CMI) at creation.com/the-lost-squadron. I have often thought it might be good to do a study in the psychology of what generates the widespread opposition/hostility to creation arguments in general which I saw in the four decades in which I was involved. I found that calm, rational objectivity was often the victim. He is far from the only example of persons using emotive language like ‘lies’ to describe either:

1. A misconception
2. An inaccurate argument
3. A statement that was false or invalid, but not intentionally so (CMI has sometimes, as more information became available, modified an article or argument for the sake of accuracy)
4. An argument that was neither, but that the objector misunderstood or was misrepresenting—in the latter case, perhaps intentionally so in order to be able to make the accusation of ‘lying’.

While I’m sure that given the nature of mankind (about which the Bible is very realistic) there are instances of creationists lying about something, the probability that the organ of an organisation consisting of many of them with public reputations would permit or even condone lying (i.e. making an intentionally false statement) in print, especially in a medium like the web which will not go ‘out of print’, is surely so vanishingly small that it should give any reasonable person pause. Most of the speakers, scientists and writers in the CMI ministry (see creation.com) have sacrificed the opportunity to pursue rewarding careers in science (in my case, medicine) because of their commitment to the cause, which would only make sense if one believed the Bible to be totally true and was committed to the Gospel of Jesus Christ—and that in a very public and vulnerable way. So for them to lie, which means a deliberate act, would make no sense. Even if some individual was living a lie, and did not really believe in Jesus, it would not make sense from a pragmatic perspective, as it would be found out on a website visited by thousands of people every day.

But—I notice that he is being a little bit clever here. He chooses to use an emotive and damning description such as ‘lie/lies/lying’, but does so in a way which conveniently avoids having to point to something I said in the article which was false (let alone intentionally false)—which he doesn’t do, presumably because he can’t. He achieves this convenient end by adding those two words to the end of his accusation, i.e. I am lying “by omission”.  But lying by omission is both harder to prove, and harder to defend against, as it pits his notion about what I should have said (and which he/she claims I purposely omitted in order to deceive) against mine.

The issue is actually very simple, and re-reading the article makes it clear; I was overtly (see the subtitle, for one thing) talking about the impression that people get about ice taking a very long time to build up, and that this is not necessarily so, i.e. that under the right conditions, thick layers of ice can build up very quickly; in fact so quickly that even though this was a fairly normal rate for that part of Greenland, the depth of the plane’s burial simply astonishes most when they hear of it.

That I was doing this should have been obvious from several other considerations, too, for instance the way I compared it to many other processes which people think take long times but don’t.

Incidentally, a fundamental rule in a critique such as he was attempting (though it does require a modicum of graciousness) is to give ‘the benefit of the doubt’, which includes adopting the framework (for the sake of the argument) of the writer, i.e. taking into consideration what he was attempting to point out and why.

In my mind front and centre would have been two things about ice:

1. the creationist model of the post-Flood Ice Age (which incidentally answers many of the problems of secular models – see the ‘related articles’ section at the bottom of my article and follow the link that mentions ‘ice age’) in which the inevitably warmer waters of the Flood provide the mechanism and the requisite energy for getting billions of cubic km of water from the oceans deposited on land as ice sheets. So it is hugely interesting to see how rapidly ice can build up in certain parts of the world even without that massively increased evaporation/precipitation.  
2. The creationist papers, written by people with the requisite scientific expertise, rebutting ice-core dating on totally unrelated grounds. These are in, for example, the peer-reviewed Journal of Creation. My article in the layman’s Creation magazine was clearly not a specific rebuttal of the assumptions of ice-core dating, though it challenged the conclusions of icecore dating, so I probably should have expected that the occasional person might take it that way, and when someone did, some years back, the editors chose to add an editors’ note.

That was already there when this critic read the article, by the way, which makes his choosing to ignore that and so mislead especially the reader who doesn’t read the article even more unfortunate.

I felt that since some would not realise how old ice sheets were supposed to be (i.e. how many years their buildup would have taken) I thought I needed to put something in about ice cores that I knew were believed to be very old – these happened to be in Greenland, too which is not surprising as there are only a handful of other places they could have been. Their exact location was IMHO immaterial to my article (which I would therefore not have bothered to look up, nor the precipitation rates) as in addition to not undertaking a specific rebuttal of ice core dating I was not implying that the precipitation rates were identical—I thought people would realise that, i.e. that the point I was making was that if one used these rates proven by the airplanes, and if in typical uniformitarian fashion one assumed that they stayed constant all that time, it would only take XYZ years.  It was as if we had published an article in which the base of a fence post had become opalised after being in the ground for only 50 years, say (such instances have been documented, btw) and had pointed out that since this can happen in some instances, one can conclude that the impression that most people have, that opalisation must take millions of years, cannot be correct. To make such a limited point does not imply that one is saying that opalisation in other parts of the world may not be happening more slowly than in this fencepost; or that one should be accused of lying for not mentioning this. But it does thoroughly rebut the idea that opalisation necessarily means long timespans. Hopefully the point is clear as applied to the ‘planes in ice’ article.

I was taught many years ago to try to put the best construction on people’s motivations, though it is hard to do sometimes. In the case of this critic, he is clearly familiar with the site creation.com on which my article appeared. This is a site with way over 10,000 articles, thousands of visitors a day and undoubtedly one of the chief representatives of the creationist viewpoint. Yet in his opening remarks he lists three ‘creationist arguments’ that are not mentioned once on the site except to rebut them. He does so in a way that clearly lets people think (I was tempted to say ‘by omission’) that creationists in general hold to them (he is also misleading folk in equating creationism and ID, despite some overlap, as our site also explains with evidence—and the ID folk would strongly agree).

In all this, by the way, I am not implying that it is inappropriate to disagree with me or with the article’s conclusions, or even to think poorly of the piece. What is out of court is the intemperate accusation, especially given the tactics highlighted just above. I do not intend to continue this discussion here regardless of any possible further forays; the article continues to be available to all to read, with its long-existing editors’ note, references, ‘related article’ links, and also now these comments here; it needs to speak for itself. Even this response was solely because without it some might have been misled into taking the accuser’s word without having even read the article itself.

That I was doing this should have been obvious from several other considerations, too, for instance the way I compared it to many other processes which people think take long times but don’t.

Thank you Dr Wieland and Dr Don Batten, I am extremely grateful to you both, as I am sure, are also my readers.

Gibber! Gibber!

Chugley

The aircraft spotting Chimp