CPT Q. 039: Does CPT rely on any ‘scientifically untestable supernatural causes’?

Q. 39. Wikipedia has the following definition for “Creation Science”:

Creation Science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism which attempts to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation myth, and disprove generally accepted scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about the history of the Earth, cosmology and biological evolution. Its most vocal proponents are fundamentalist Christians in the United States who seek to prove Biblical inerrancy and nullify the scientific evidence for evolution. The main ideas in creation science are: the belief in “creation ex nihilo”; the conviction that the Earth was created within the last ten thousand years; the belief that mankind and other life on Earth were created as distinct fixed “baraminological” kinds; and the hypothesis that fossils found in geological strata were deposited during a cataclysmic flood which completely covered the entire Earth. As a result, creation science also challenges the geologic and astrophysical evidence for the age and origins of Earth and Universe, which creation scientists acknowledge are irreconcilable to the Genesis account. While creation science purports to be a genuinely scientific challenge to historical geology, the antiquity of the universe, and the theory of evolution (which creation science proponents often refer to as Darwinism or as Darwinian evolution), is a religious, not a scientific view. Creation science does not qualify as science because it lacks empirical support, supplies no tentative hypotheses, and resolves to describe natural history in terms of scientifically untestable supernatural causes.

Would you say that your model is based on or relies on “scientifically untestable supernatural causes” or events? If so, which portions of your model rely on the supernatural? Would you agree that Creation scientists should not invoke the supernatural without Biblical evidence that clearly indicates that God overrode the natural laws?

Response: I would say that for the majority of the aspects of CPT, such as describing the present physical features of the seafloor, including its topography, its mid-ocean ridges, transform faults, deep ocean trenches, island arcs, seamounts, sediment thickness distribution, heat flow distribution, and magnetic reversal pattern; inferring the present structure and state of the earth’s interior from seismic, GPS, gravity, and geoid datasets and the chemical compositions of magmas; inferring the deformational properties of silicate minerals under mantle conditions through laboratory experiments; and even inferring the magnitude and types of geological and tectonic changes which have taken place in the earth’s past, there is no invocation of the supernatural. The place in CPT where the supernatural must be invoked, as far as I can presently discern, is in regard to the removal of heat from the rapidly forming oceanic lithosphere. The measured thermal diffusivity of rock is much too low to cool the newly forming lithosphere at the rate implied by CPT. Moreover, there is no adequate sink for so much heat even if the thermal diffusivity were somehow much higher. The only solution I can envision is a rapid volumetric removal of heat, at least in the top 50-100 km of the earth, during the Flood. This, as far as I can see, represents a supernatural solution.

Although CPT, strictly speaking, does not specifically include the issues associated with the history of nuclear decay, the overall worldview framework based on a literal understanding of Genesis 1-11, which CPT seeks to defend, certainly does. As pointed out in the conclusions of the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) project, a consistent interpretation of the history of nuclear decay in terms of a literal understanding of Genesis 1-11 requires invoking the supernatural in two ways, first, in the acceleration of nuclear decay rates during two episodes, during creation and the again during the Flood, and second, in the rapid removal of most of the radiogenic heat generated during both of these episodes. The RATE team speculated that these two departures from uniformitarian natural law might simply represent two sides of same coin, so to speak. In other words, whatever temporary change God made in the natural order to cause the rates of nuclear decay to increase by many orders of magnitude may have simultaneously resulted in a volumetric removal of the heat that was released from the accelerated nuclear decay. The RATE team concluded that the observations and logic behind its conclusions were extremely solid.

The reason for including the issue of radioisotope decay in this answer is to point out that the one point at which supernatural intervention seems to be required for CPT, namely, rapid removal of heat, overlaps with where supernatural intervention is required to make sense of the radioisotope history. Let me emphasize here that the RATE experimental findings (which themselves do not rely on any suspensions of the laws of physics) represent glaring problems for the uniformitarian framework, basically contradicting its guiding axiom that all (especially the laws of physics) has continued just as it was from the beginning of creation.

Finally, would I agree that creation scientists should not invoke the supernatural without Biblical support that clearly indicates that God overrode the natural laws? Yes, in general, I agree. However, I earnestly believe that 2 Peter 3:3-6 reveals that God did intervene in the natural order during the Flood. Therefore, to exclude all intervention on God’s part when seeking to understand the Flood in terms of the currently observed laws of nature is to ignore this revelation. I therefore conclude any model for what took place during the Flood that has any significant overlap with reality will contain at least one aspect where uniformitarian explanations simply cannot be made to work.