It sounds to me like the RATE team just gave up and quit.
Give up? Oh no, they didn't
give up. What gave you that impression? Coyote merely said that they found that all the evidence proved them wrong. But they're creationists, that didn't make them
give up. It's not like they're scientists or something.
What happened was this. They found that the rocks showed evidence of hundreds of millions of years of radioactive decay. So then they postulated an unevidenced, unobserved mechanism ("accelerated decay") contrary to the known laws of nature, that would make it look like the Earth was old when it was young. But then they noticed that this mechanism would have melted the Earth, boiled the seas, and killed Noah and his floating zoo. So then they postulated an unevidenced, unobserved mechanism contrary to the known laws of nature that would get rid of the heat and make it look like accelerated decay hadn't happened when it had. Then they concluded that the Bible was reliable.
You will notice that by such methods one need never
give up on any belief. If you think the sky is green with pink spots, and you look and see that it is blue ... no problem. All you have to do is postulate an unevidenced, unobserved mechanism contrary to the known laws of nature that makes it look blue when it's green with pink spots. You need never
give up. Of course, if you do that, you
have given up
doing science, but you haven't given up your precious, precious belief in the youth of the earth or the greenness of the sky or whatever proposition, contrary to the observed evidence, you would like to believe in despite of all the mere observations that you've ever made.
---
In case you think I'm making any of this up, here's something I wrote about RATE on a previous thread, with quotes, links, and references.
---
Let us turn to the much-vaunted RATE project of the Institute For Creation Research. Amongst their findings,
they admit:
A large amount of nuclear decay did indeed occur in the zircons. Other evidence strongly supports much nuclear decay having occurred in the past [14, pp. 335-337]. We emphasize this point because many creationists have assumed that "old" radioisotopic ages are merely an artifact of analysis, not really indicating the occurrence of large amounts of nuclear decay. But according to the measured amount of lead physically present in the zircons, approximately 1.5 billion years worth at today’s rates of nuclear decay occurred.
This is the point at which an actual scientist would start to think that maybe the Earth wasn't all that young. But no, they have a better idea --- "highly accelerated nuclear decay". Though
the details are somewhat sketchy:
These diffusion data are not precise enough to reveal details about the acceleration episodes. Were there one, two, or three? Were they during early Creation week, after the Fall, or during the Flood? Were there only 500 to 600 million years worth of acceleration during the year of the Flood, with the rest of the acceleration occurring before that?
The details of
how this could have happened are not so much sketchy as non-existent.
At this point I should like to mention that
the slogan of the Institute For Creation Reasearch is "Biblical. Accurate. Certain."
It has of course been pointed out to the folks at the ICR that this "accelerated decay" would have melted the Earth, boiled the seas, and killed off Noah and his maritime menagerie. As
RATE member Larry Vardiman admits:
The amount of heat produced by a decay rate of a million times faster than normal during the year of the Flood could potentially vaporize the earth’s oceans, melt the crust, and obliterate the surface of the earth.
But they are equal to the challenge:
The RATE group is confident that the accelerated decay they discovered was not only caused by God, but that the necessary removal of heat was also superintended by Him as well.
"With one bound, Jack was free!"
How exactly God achieved this is unclear even to them. As they admit:
The removal of heat was so rapid that it likely involved a process other than conduction, convection, or radiation. (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, vol. II, p.763, my emphasis.)
In short, they have discovered the principle of Smacco's Rozar:
To any hypothesis, no matter how contrary to reality, further hypotheses may be added to explain away the discrepancy.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
™ Version 4.2
