Reality Check 101

Clear thinking is not as easy as it would seem sometimes.  There are some fundamental principles to sound reasoning that are not that difficult to recognize.  An article from 2008, copyrighted by the American Chemical Society (How I learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Fallacy), is a great example. 

Citing data from the Department of Transportation and the Department of Agriculture, Stephen R. Johnson was able to show that in the years 1996 through 2000, highway fatality rates fell directly in proportion to the number of Metric tons of Lemons imported from Mexico.  For example, in 1996 the rate of traffic deaths was approximately 15.86 per 100,000.  The U.S. imported about 225 metric tons (MT’s) of lemons.  By the year 2000, the death rate was down to just over 14.8 and lemon imports had risen to over 525 MT’s.  It would seem that if traffic deaths are to be controlled, the U.S. needs to flood our markets with lemons.  Seeing is believing.  If that pace had continued, by now we would be importing about 1,400 MT’s and the casualties would be down to a rate of 4.75.  Suffice it to say, it never happened.

The most obvious lesson from lemons and vehicles is that because two things happen simultaneously, even over a long time, does not mean that they cause each other or that they are even remotely related.  It also demonstrates what happens when predictions, good or bad, are made from partial information or wrong assumptions.  Almost the entire CO2/global catastrophe agenda is based on this fallacy.

In 1992, an enterprising geologist went to the site of a mountain formation that had piqued his interest.  In an effort to verify the date of the formation, he submitted multiple samples of different minerals to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Mass. for dating (https://creation.com/excess-argon-within-mineral-concentrates ).  The results demonstrated ages, depending on the sample, ranging from 340,000 years old to 2.8 million years old – a discrepancy of almost 2.5 million years.

The samples were from the ten-year-old lava dome of Mount St. Helens.  The volcano erupted with deadly force in May of 1980 and was still doing damage two years later (https://creation.com/lessons-from-mount-st-helens ).  By the end of the event, a sedimentary (not lava) deposit 25 ft thick had been laid down in 3 hours.  In addition, three main canyons were formed with streams and exposed strata.  One of them, Step Canyon, is over 600 ft deep.

Lesson two:  There need not be only two choices.  Never, in science or anything else, assume what may be true without all the verifiable facts.  An evolutionary geologist analyzing those canyons would see “water-carved” exposures of strata and an ancient volcanic dome. Without the advantage of eye-witnesses and carefully documented facts,  the earlier dates would be dismissed as a result of error and the older ones defended as what fits best.  “Counterfactual” mistakes such as this are rampant in secularist geology, paleontology, biology, and cosmology – nothingness to something, bare matter to life, life to consciousness, from consciousness to intelligence, from intelligence to self-awareness and rationality.

Trilobite fossils appear in lower layers of rock and are structurally simple.  Dinosaurs appear at higher levels and are structurally more complex.  Evolutionists conclusions:  Lower levels must be much older that upper ones.  Simple structures came first and then took eons of time to become more complex.  What should be obvious to sound thinking is that few things in scientific research are subject to only one set of conclusions, especially when conclusions are based in just one acceptable world view.  What if we don’t have all the pertinent information about the environments or circumstances around those fossils?  What if there are other ways that layers of rock are laid down which could be applied to the data?  To deny those possibilities and belittle anyone who offers them is the fallacy of false dilemma (black or white thinking) – the third important lesson in clear thinking.  It is related to the false assumption that a lack of total proof requires the opposite claim to be true.

A third lesson comes from the earliest days of science education.  Any theory that is not testable, either by experimentation or direct observation, should be viewed with suspicion.  This is one of the most fundamental principles of sound research – the falsifiability of a claim.  A scientific explanation must be verifiable.  As someone once told me years ago, researchers in disciplines such as the biomedical sciences present an idea (hypothesis) and then formulate experiments to support or refute it.  In stark contrast, evolutionary biologists or paleontologists are limited to describing what is observed in the present.  The theories they propose are not directly observable or experimentally verifiable.   There is no way to witness, test, and prove the solutions they claim.   Majority interpretation, usually based on a preconceived view, is not truth or science, but philosophy.  Within this reality, creationist explanations are just as possible as any other.

Lesson four cautions that truth is not established by attacking the credentials, reputation, intellect, or character of a person, source or idea  – build a flawed image, a straw man, and attack it.  One of the most common claims by secularists is that anyone who disputes climate change alarmism, or the accepted geologic and fossil timeline does not believe in science itself, is woefully ignorant of the issues, is willfully blind, or are agenda-driven propagandists.   Either believe or admit that the alternative is not based in rational intelligent thought.  Even if many of the negatives were true, that has nothing to do with the truth of the claim itself.

In the end, the ability to think clearly cannot be separated from how a person views the surrounding world and how it functions.  All the sound logic in the universe will never get past a faulty understanding of one’s self and everything else about our existence (worldview).  For a worldview to be acceptable, it must at least be consistent and include a way to explain all the evidence.

Only creation consistently explains beginnings from an independent, eternal, necessary, all-powerful Cause.  It meets all the challenges of evidence and offers more than an impossible nothing-to-everything, chaos-to-harmony, chance-to-design, and life-to-destruction hopelessness.