Open Letter to ICR

Part XIV

My obligation to the worldwide scientific community in light of your disseminating the claim that polonium halos in granites are secondary: I MUST SPEAK OUT FOR THE SAKE OF PASTORS AND MANY OTHERS WHO WOULD OTHERWISE BE BADLY MISLED INTO THINKING THEY MUST ACCEPT YOUR NEW POSITION BECAUSE OF THE STRENGTH OF YOUR REPUTATION OF BEING THE WORLD'S LEADING CREATION GEOLOGIST.

Andrew, my friend, for you to continue down your present path may possibly lead to my having to confront the issue even more publicly. For example, as earlier indicated herein, Larry Vardiman sent out a report by you and Mark Armitage to the effect that you have both found evidence that falsifies my results on the primordial origin of polonium halos. What I find most interesting is that neither you, nor Mark Armitage, nor anyone at ICR, has informed me of these results, which indeed would be most startling if they are true. In other words, you and ICR have chosen to work together secretively, in a most clandestine fashion to accomplish your goal of undermining my published results prior to my obtaining knowledge of your results. But have you and Mark really falsified my published works? And have you, for reasons best known to you and ICR, decided to keep it all a secret until you spring it on me?

Or is it true that you are now in the process of making claims of falsification based on the same kind of flawed plausibility arguments that you have advanced to supposedly provide unequivocal evidence for the secondary origin of granites?

There is a very easy and straightforward way to decide which it is.

Specifically, any claim for the secondary origin of polonium halos in granites clearly means that such must have formed naturally, by secondary processes, which even more specifically means — just as in the case of granites — that they must have formed by nothing more than the action of known physical laws. Therefore, a laboratory test of whether polonium halos in granites really are secondary would be for them to be duplicated or synthesized in a piece of granite from which all halos have previously been annealed. As noted in my book, this is in fact part of the challenge I published in EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, back in 1979, which I then repeated at the Arkansas trial, and which I again presented at the widely attended, Evolutionists Confront Creationists Symposium, held as part of the 1982 Annual Meeting of the Western Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Santa Barbara.

Over twenty-four years have now elapsed since I first published that challenge, and there has been only a deafening silence. The failure of any team of evolutionists or creationists to accomplish this feat is why the tiny mystery of creation shines now even more brightly for God's glory than it did when Brent Dalrymple called it a tiny mystery at the Arkansas trial. And yes, even more recently, over the past decade this challenge has twice been forcefully presented to, on each occasion, about thirty thousand earth scientists, with no response whatsoever.

So, have you and Mark Armitage now succeeded where tens of thousands of evolutionists — and an untold number of creationists — have so signally failed? Have you now succeeded in producing even one Po-218 halo in a piece of granite? (I have a single specimen of biotite which has thousands per cubic centimeter, far more than one.) If not, may I suggest that your credibility, and that of ICR, will soon suffer far more than it has already suffered because of your present fallacious claim of having found unequivocal evidence of the secondary origin of granite. In my view your position is untenable, but not without hope if you and ICR are now willing to make amends.

Moreover, I strongly suspect that if your readership were now given the opportunity to review all those biblical passages on the foundations of the Earth contained herein — meaning, of course, if ICR were to publish all this information in a forthcoming issue of A&F — then you and ICR would very quickly learn it would be far more difficult to find any of the readership that would continue to buy into granites being secondary rocks derived from sedimentary rocks formed at the Flood. But, given the strong Christian affiliation that you and ICR have, would you not want to strongly consider taking action on this very soon? Even more, being an almost exclusively Christian audience, do not A&F's readers expect that ICR will always and under all circumstances faithfully provide them with the whole biblical truth — or should we say, all the biblical facts about the topic in hand in Acts and Facts — regardless of whether you ever give me the opportunity to respond or not?

So, it is quite evident that what is beginning to emerge from my response to your invitation to join with you, is now taking on meaning that is of far greater consequence than whether I will ever be able to do that. The tremendously urgent and imperative issue now at hand obviously pertains to the entire creation science community — and indeed to the world as a whole. For it focuses significant attention on the unreliable nature of the information that you and ICR have widely distributed to the hundred or so thousand persons who received your Impact #353, with its claim that granites are derived from fossiliferous sedimentary rocks, and thus that granites and their enclosed polonium halos cannot represent primordial rocks or primordial radioactivity.

Thus, with all due respect, and with due consideration of all the foregoing, it seems to me that you — and ICR as well — would have been far better off in your Nov. 17 email to have forthrightly admitted that you had erred, and that you really did not have unequivocal evidence for granites originating with fossiliferous sedimentary rocks at all. Whether you agree with this or not, I realize we must deal with what is, not with what is not. My suggestion for dealing with what is could be as simple as you and ICR admitting you had unwittingly erred and overstepped the bounds of scientific propriety. At issue here is the methodology you and your colleagues at ICR adopted to accomplish the dissemination of your claim of the secondary origin of granite and their enclosed polonium halos.

What you have attempted to do is to persuade the 100,000 trusting souls on ICR's mailing list of your plausibility arguments against a primordial origin of granites and their enclosed primordial polonium halos, and against the widely published scientific evidence of Earth's rapid creation — which evidence neither evolutionists nor creationists have ever been able to refute. Further, by attempting to discredit the experimental tests that can easily distinguish the true from the false, you and ICR have effectively taken a giant step toward completely divesting the origin of granite, and hence the origin of the Earth itself, from experimental testing in the laboratory in the here and now.

In this case there is left only one option upon which creationists could possibly build a model of Earth's history. And that is that some creation geologist, backed by the prestige of a world-renowned creationist organization, must come along who will utilize a slightly modified form of conventional geology's time-honored assumption that the truth about Earth history can be obtained only by the elite few (one?) who, by long experience in mapping and close observation, have mastered the skill of rightly interpreting just how and when various geological formations were emplaced.

Thus this geologist and his host organization would by default become the ultimate authorities on creation and the Flood — authorities who are now most unfortunately bent on attempting to convince the world of a geological paradigm that denies the Bible's plainest statements relating to the identity of Earth's foundation rocks.

This is what I must oppose — and will expose, to the best of my very limited ability — if you and ICR continue on the path you have begun. It is my sincere hope that I will not have to do this. It remains my sincere hope that you and ICR will not only desist from propagating the errors thus far published, but will do an about-face and retract them yourselves, or provide me the opportunity of communicating the information contained herein to the readership of Acts and Facts.

I urge you to do this, for your claim that granites and their enclosed polonium halos are secondary is shown in every way to be based on false assumptions, which is all the more reason for you and ICR to join me in proclaiming the great truth of equating granites with the biblical definition of Earth's foundation rocks.