Creation's Tiny Mystery

Pars. 1 and 2.—In these two paragraphs Wise mixes some of his own views with mine. To clarify the issue, I have made a clear statement of my creation model in A Tentative Creation Model in the appendix.

Pars. 3, 4, and 5.—There is no difficulty in studying polonium halos for anyone who wishes to do so. Joly saw polonium halos and he had no museum specimens to study. Henderson studied polonium halos at length and he had no museum specimens. I have studied them at even greater length without museum numbers with which to refer. The reason that polonium halos have been studied without museum numbers is that they are of worldwide occurrence; they are easy to find. I have reported polonium halos in granites and pegmatites from several continents. Their occurrence is as widespread and pervasive as is the occurrence of those rocks all over the world. University geological museums contain countless thousands of rocks from such locations; so there is no dearth of material to study polonium halos. Moreover, polonium halos do not change their characteristics from one continent to the other so that their study is not confined to a single site or location. If Wise needs material to study polonium halos, all he has to do is order biotite specimens from Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York. At any time during the past several years Wise could have availed himself of this material and made as many petrographic sections as he wished to study the rocks.

Pars. 6 and 7.—There is no question that polonium halos in rocks raise some very disturbing issues for conventional uniformitarian geology. However, Wise's assertion that I claim polonium halos are "always found in granites," is patently untrue, In fact, if Wise had carefully read my scientific reports, he would have seen that I specifically note the existence of polonium halos in Precambrian pegmatites (Gentry et al., 1974), fluorite (Gentry, 1973, 1974) and cordierite (Gentry, 1973). What Wise apparently has not understood is that the existence of polonium halos in crystalline rocks served to identify these rocks as the created rocks of this world and that further research will identify even other varieties of rocks as being in this category. In particular, the existence of polonium halos in the biotite at the Fission and Silver Crater Mines serves to identify the host "vein dikes" as also being created rocks, and as already noted, 15 years ago (Gentry, 1973) I published information on the existence of polonium halos in cordierite; so there is no question that at that time I considered the cordierite and its host rock to be among the created rocks. Contrary to Wise's evaluation, this information does not present a difficulty to my creation model. Neither does the inclusion of gneiss as a type of created rock cause a problem as Wise seems to imply. The best that can be said is that it presents a problem for his understanding of my creation model.

In addition, I must note that rhyolite is not granite. Rhyolite and granite have only one thing in common and that is elemental composition. However, granite and rhyolite differ somewhat in mineral composition, quite considerably in mineral grain size, and especially in the presence of polonium halos in one and absence of them in the other.

Par. 8.—In this paragraph Wise first comments on the age sequence of polonium-halo-containing rocks but, interestingly, he does not discuss either the model or the dating method used to arrive at his age sequence. Rather, the entire basis for his conclusions on age sequences is the information in his Table II. Without any disclaimer or discussion of any alternative interpretation of the geological terms in that table, the "accepted age" referred to there seems to be just the conventional geological age determined by uniformitarian geology. In other words, Wise is implicitly using the results of uniformitarian radiometric dating to establish an age sequence of rocks containing polonium halos. However, as I show several times in my book (Gentry, 1988), there is no scientific basis for accepting the crucial assumption of decay rate constancy and without that assumption the conventional ages determined by radioactive methods are meaningless.

Much of the rest of the paragraph is given to various claims about the nature of polonium-halo-bearing rocks but no references are provided to substantiate the interpretation given. Do such references even exist? If so, why were they not provided? I would be happy to respond in print to Wise's claims about polonium-halo-containing rocks if and when he can provide valid documentation for them.

Par. 9—I have referred to Precambrian granites as basement rocks of the continents to convey the widespread occurrence of polonium halos and also as an illustration of the vast amount of rock which must be identified with the rocks that were created. To say, as Wise does, that some rocks below the earth are of more mafic composition than granites in no way detracts from the evidence pointing to such granites being among Earth's genesis rocks. In this paragraph Wise again makes claims about polonium-halo-containing rocks being younger than "volcanics and even sediments." But I find no documentation for such claims. I would gladly have responded to them if references had been supplied.

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