For those who would want to watch the film in order to respond in detail, it is currently available on Netflix. I added it to my list, but my school homework and project take priority at present.
I looked through reviews of it on Netflix. Predictably, it was largely either praised by YECs or panned by skeptics. Some skeptics gave it high marks for presenting the creationist position (even though they don't agree with it) and a number of Christians objected to it for presenting YEC as the only alternative to the standard scientific view. It smells like a standard piece of creationist propaganda -- one reviewer said that he grew up under Communism and this film is exactly like the propaganda films that they had to watch, the only difference being that at least they all knew that those films were lies, whereas the creationists don't.
There's a Wikipedia entry for the movie at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Genesis_History%3F. My digging before that find revealed that Dr. Del Tackett, DM (Doctor of Management?), had produced
The Truth Project for Dobson's
Focus on the Family, an educational series instructing you how to be a biblical Christian -- it's inspiration was a Barna Group poll which found that only 8% of Christians were living biblically. Since
The Truth Project was created solely for the indoctrination of people who were already Christians and not for proselytizing purposes, I was cool with that. However, if this movie was also created by the ironically-named "Truth Project", then its distribution on Netflix would certainly appear to be a foray into proselytizing.
According to Wikipedia, there is no connection with
The Truth Project except for the person of Del Tackett, who is only the narrator.
I see that Dr. Steve Austin, PhD Geology, is in it. I remember him from back when he was Stuart Nevins writing geology articles for the
Creation Research Society Quarterly. You see, he was being paid by a creationist organization, the ICR as I recall though it could have been the CRS, to earn an actual PhD in geology from an actual accredited university (Pennsylvania State University, 1979, according to a creationist site). The problem for creationists at the time that they needed to solve was that they had virtually nobody with an actual doctorate in the hard sciences that they were making claims about -- add to that the huge problem that many creationists claiming advanced degrees had gotten them from diploma mills (eg, Kent Hovind, though his bogus degrees weren't even in any kind of science but he insisted on parading them about even to the point of insisting that he be listed as "Dr Hovind" in the phone book) or else they were honorary degrees (eg, Harold Slusher with an honorary doctorate while the only actual highest degree he had earned was a Masters of Science -- he has been teaching at the University of Texas at El Paso, where he was first listed as "Dr. Slusher", but that has since been corrected).
So the creationists desperately needed an actual PhD Geology, so they hired one by putting Steve Austin through school. While he was working on his degree, he wrote several creationist geology articles, such as the ones that I encountered in the
Creation Research Society Quarterly. During that time, he used a pseudonym, Stuart Nevins, a rough anagram of his real name (an e and t of his real name are not used, plus there is no source for the r in Stuart), for the purpose of hiding his identity so that what he was writing could not leak back to his professors. Which was a necessary move, because in those articles he, as a graduate student, was writing nonsense that even lower-division geology students (ie, the freshman and sophomore levels, the very first two years of university) would know was utterly false.
It's been three decades, but one example I remember was that he pointed to a formation of strata over a hundred feet thick that were supposed to have formed over so many millions of years. Therefore, he concluded in the article (even though he had to have known better), geologists were claiming that that formation had to have formed at an absolutely uniform rate of a very small fraction of an inch every single year. Complete and utter nonsense and something that any geology student with one or two semesters of geology under her belt would instantly know not to say. Steve Austin knew better. You cannot complete a doctorate program and be a complete clueless idiot -- Clifford Stoll's oral exam for his doctorate alone is evidence of that. In writing those articles, Steve Austin knew that what he was writing was false, yet he wrote it anyway, in article after article. That makes him a deliberate liar.
OK, so he was like a local newsperson in a Sinclair-owned station having to read that "fake news" denouncement announcement written by a Russian (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PlTDeTrELk). He "had to write all that nonsense in order to please his masters". Bullshit! He was a willing participant.
So then, in the film does Dr. Steve Austin (he earned it, so he can fly it;
Mr. Kent Hovind is an entirely different matter altogether) bring up the ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project? I cannot imagine that he wouldn't have. It turns out that he was deceiving you in that. But a little background first.
Just about every dating method (or any method for anything at all for that matter) is based on certain assumptions which are based on certain conditions. In comparison, the real world can be very messy and things
can happen which can throw off some of those assumptions and hence yield false dates. Knowing that, scientists have taken the approach of discovering the situations which can throw off their dating methods and compensating for them -- that is opposed to the standard creationist approach of just throwing their hands in the air and proclaiming "goddidit". As a result, scientists have accumulated quite a library of things and situations that could throw a particular dating method off and produce a false date. Just where exactly do you think that creationists have gotten their "false ages" from? Did they do their own original research? HELL NO! They just researched through standard geological research and misrepresented what they found. Duh?
Although most of my work with "creation science" dates back to 1981, my very first exposure to it was around 1970 when I was a Jesus Freak fellow traveller. At that time I heard a lot of indistinct claims about science actually supporting the Bible (meaning their own particular interpretation of what the Bible must mean, not the actual Bible itself), but I was only presented with two specific claims.
The second claim was a particularly hoary one: in the mid-1960's a NASA computer working with lunar orbit calculations discovered Joshua's "Lost Day" -- when he had commanded the sun to stop in its orbit about the earth. A Christian and a physicist, Dr. Allan H. Harvey, AKA "Steam Doc" (since some of his research was on the properties of water), wrote a number of remarkable essays, which he posted at
http://steamdoc.itgo.com/writings.htm, with the "
Thoughts on "Joshua's Long Day"
Basically, NASA was supposed to have this program to predict the location of the moon, so they ran it back through time into prehistory, before there were any kind of records of the moon's position (so what the frak for? what possible purpose?), but the program abruptly stopped around 4004 BCE stating that there was nothing before that time. Then as they ran it back forward towards the present, it came up one day short. Nobody there could understand why, until a Christian engineer (yes, they do exist, but that's a completely different discussion) pulled out his Bible and pointed out when Joshua had commanded the sun to stand still so that they could complete the slaughter of that particular battle before the sun had set.
My source,
Thoughts on "Joshua's Long Day is a good one. In 2002, Answers in Genesis included it in their list of claims that they wished creationists would stop using (which was opposed by that convicted fraud, Kent Hovind, since most of the bad claims listed were ones that he still used). If you Google on that claim, I feel that I can safely predict that most of your hits will be Christian sites that debunk that claim. It is truly thoroughly bogus.
The thing is that even in 1970, nearly a full decade before anyone actually had any kind of access to a computer, I knew that what that claim was saying about computers was complete and utter bullshit. Even then, I knew that computers were not magical and could not possibly know anything outside of what they were programmed for. No computer could ever possibly know that nothing existed before 4004 BCE, though some human could write a computer program to look for a date before 4004 BCE and display an arbitrary message, chosen by that human programmer, to say whatever the hell he wanted it to say.
What really surprised me happened later. Our local newspaper's Sunday edition included an 10-page magazine insert which I guess was used by many newspapers. Around 1990, that magazine repeated that NASA computer claim, a full decade after a helluva lot of people had had a chance to learn what computers are and how to work with them.
Anyway, that is the claim that in 1970 told me that creationism was not true. The first claim was that living fresh water clams were radio-dated to be thousands of years old. My natural skepticism was augmented greatly by the complete and utter bullshit of the NASA computer claim, so I rejected that claim without knowing anything about it.
A decade later, I learned to my surprise that the creationists were still around, so I looked into their claims, actually expecting to find some kind of there there, and found absolutely nothing except for lies and deception.
I finally found a reference for that fresh-water mollusc claim, so I did the unthinkable: I went to the university library and I looked it up. Yes indeed, those fresh-water clams did indeed yield anomalous ages according to radio-carbon dating. However, the article said things that the creationists decided to not mention at all. The article mentioned that the clams' main source of carbon to build their shells was from the dissolved limestone form their stream's source, a spring from limestone strata. This "reservoir effect " is very well-known (except to deceiving creationists), in which the carbon intake into the organisms under examination comes form old sources. Another example would be marine mammals feeding on organisms who in turn feed on organisms from a deeper depth.
Think about it. Carbon-dating is based on atmospheric nitrogen being converted to C-14 through cosmic ray bombardment. Being chemically identical to C-12, C-14 gets incorporated into organic material and thus can be used to date organic matter.
A few problems here. First problem: what about animals? Do animals take in C-14 from the atmosphere and incorporate it into their body tissues?
No! We animals breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon-dioxide. Well, how do we ever take carbon into our tissues? By
eating. Plants taking carbon-dioxide and use it to create carbo-hydrates which we then eat either directly or indirectly (ie, by eating an animal who had eaten a plant). In short, a plant takes in C-14 just by being a plant, but an animal takes in C-14 only by being in a food chain that involves plants.
A great number of creationist claims against radiocarbon dating completely ignore the reservoir effect. Therefore, those claims are lies.
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