Dr. Emil Silvestru

Silvestru stopped by the school for a presentation today on creation science - dinosaurs, the villany of evolution, etc.

The more I hear from these people, the more I'm convinced their somehow fundamentally wrong. They're always trying to use common sense to disprove the accumulated body of work of professional scientists. I understand this is probably their intentional strategy, because the audiences to which they generally speak are not scientists. But the common sense to be found in a room full of grade 7-12 students is hardly impressive.

Example: "In such-and-such a museum, an exhibit displayed such-and-such a dinoasaur. [powerpoint photo of exhibit] Since the creation of the exhibit however, scientists decided that that particular dinosaur was an intermediate step in the process of dinosaurs evolving into birds..." (from birds? I forget) "... Now look at what they've done to the exhibit [powerpoint photo of updated exhibit - feathers have been added, giving it a somewhat comic effect. Audience laughs.] What is it going to do with those feathers? How silly."

This is a paraphrase, of course, but an accurate interpreatation of the point he was trying to make.

Here's another example. Some scientist discovered a dinosaur bone in Amerca that still had meat on it. Yes, meat. A thigh bone, I think it was, with soft tissue attached, and the tissue still had elasticity. And so, the idea that dinosaurs are 17 million years old is impossible, because meat wouldn't stay soft so long. Now, it seems to me, that the problem is a little deeper than that. If the dinosaurs are 6000 years old ... well, I'm not so sure the meat would stay soft even that long. (How long does it take for meat to ... uh ... do whatever it does? Years? Months?) But again, Emil used the audiences collective common sense to tackle a problem that probably needs the attention of professional, trained scientists and technicians.

Carbon dating: According to Emil, carbon dating is unreliable because of obvious errors in the practice of carbon dating. For example, some skeleton with hair was dated by scientists, but the bones showed the thing was 24000 years old while the hair showed the thing was only 17000 years old, and clearly the beast could not have lived 7000 years (and then grown hair) so the method is inaccurate. But I'm not sure that's a fair treatment of what "the scientists" are claiming. Carbon dating is used, it seems to me, to very vaguely measure huge amounts of time. Two frames of a film, 7000 years apart, in a 17-million-year movie, are pretty close together.

Lastly, Emil warns us, very accurately, that everyone uses one paradigm or another to view facts and evidence. We all see the world differently. But then he tells us that there are only two ways to see scientific evidence such as this (his words: "only two ways"). They are, of course, that God created everything as told in the Bible, or everything created itself out of nothing.

Surely there's somewhere in between.