I recently had the pleasure of attending a talk by Andrew Snelling.
Unlike my previous experience at a talk by John Baumgardner, I do not feel that this time the speaker was honest at all. John truly believed in the potential of his models, of a young earth, and of the plethora of PRATTs he machine gunned through during his talk. Mr. Snelling on the other hand is a showman if I ever saw one!
The bulk of his talk was dedicated to giving repeated examples of supposedly invalid radiometric dates. Some I have heard before such as the dating of the Hawaii basalts and of "new" rock from Mt. St. Helens. The thing I noticed most about the way he presented it though was just that we as the audience were supposed to take away that there was some great mystery going on here. Everything was crafted specifically to inject doubt into the minds of the audience about the competence of mainstream geology. The pattern was to present some vague, undetailed inconsistency and say, "Now what does this say about the voracity of mainstream scientists doing mainstream geology? Hmmmm?"
The last part of the talk was about Po Halos. He completely breezed through his assumption that halos are created via alpha decay even though there is some evidence that alpha decay has nothing to do with it. It was done in a sort of "hurry up, don't look over here" kind of way which rooted the idea of alpha decay as the cause of halos for the rest of the presentaion. Then he went on to describe how these rocks that contain halos would have to form fast in order to trap the short lived Po in time for them to decay and leave the halos. It was a very clever and VERY DECITFUL tactic of hiding some real consequences of what he was proposing. A ziron is supposed to form trapping high concentrations of Po, the rest of the rock is supposed to form around it, and then the Po decays leaving the halos. Given the short half-life of some isotopes of Po, it mean that basically this would have to happen instantaneously which of course is absolutly rediculous unless the whole of chemistry as we know it is turned upsidedown. Unfortunatly there was little time given to the audience for questions that would point this out. Much of the time for questions was quickly consumed by friends of the hosting organization parroting creo dogma. After John Baumgardner was ripped into by some audience members, it seemed as though they did not want any challanges raised against what amounted to a very dubious presentation.
The audience was composed of primarily engineers, and physicists.
Of course, biblical creationists are committed to belief in God's written Word, the Bible, which forbids bearing false witness; --AIG (lest they forget)
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