ICR's "Summary of Scientific Evidence for Creation"

This is a response to an article by Duane Gish, on the web site of the Institute for Creation Research. Gish was one of the big names in creationism, and had a Ph.D. in biochemistry, so we would expect him to be quite an authority. He pasted away in March of this year.

The article is here.The section titles are taken from that document.
http://www.icr.org/article/177/

I. The Universe and the Solar System Were Suddenly Created.

This is an astonishing claim.  Sure, the universe suddenly appeared (whether created or not), but not the solar system. Curiously Gish offers zero evidencve to support his claim that the solar system was suddenly created.

With regards to the universe, he cites the Second Law as proving God did it, which I have taken apart previously.

II. Life Was Suddenly Created.

 He bases this claim on the fact that there is a certain point in the fossil record before which there are no fossil - which is exactly what you would expect. He claims the first fossils were complex organisms, which you might think means lions and elephants and giraffes, but they were nothing like that.

The fact is that fossils have been found from as long ago as 3.5 billion years, and these are the fossils of single-celled organisms - cyanobacteria. To be fair, even these organisms are presumably not that simple, but we are just going going to see anything less complex in the fossil record. It is amazing we even see these.

III. All Present Living Kinds of Animals and Plants Have Remained Fixed Since Creation, Other than Extinctions, and Genetic Variation in Originally Created Kinds Has Only Occurred within Narrow Limits.

This is basically the argument that there are no transitional fossils.  Actually, there are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

IV. Mutation and Natural Selection Are Insufficient To Have Brought About Any Emergence of Present Living Kinds from a Simple Primordial Organism.

The argument from improbability. Of course, Gish does not do any calculations, he just asserts that the "mathematical probability ... is infinitesimally small even after many billions of years".

Well, I assert it is not.

V. Man and Apes Have a Separate Ancestry.

You might think a guy with a Ph.D. in biochemistry would be interested in the genetic similarity. Apparently not. This is just about rubbishing various transitional fossils, so is the same argument as III.

Real scientists, doing real science, have looking at the DNA, and established that the chimpanzee's DNA is closer to our own than it is to a gorilla's:

 While the genetic difference between individual humans today is minuscule – about 0.1%, on average – study of the same aspects of the chimpanzee genome indicates a difference of about 1.2%. The bonobo (Pan paniscus), which is the close cousin of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes), differs from humans to the same degree. The DNA difference with gorillas, another of the African apes, is about 1.6%. Most importantly, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all show this same amount of difference from gorillas. A difference of 3.1% distinguishes us and the African apes from the Asian great ape, the orangutan. How do the monkeys stack up?  All of the great apes and humans differ from rhesus monkeys, for example, by about 7% in their DNA.

All this fits perfectly with the nested hierarchy required by evolution. But it is quite a problem for creations.

VI. The Earth's Geologic Features Were Fashioned Largely by Rapid, Catastrophic Processes that Affected the Earth on a Global and Regional Scale (Catastrophism).

Some were, some were not.

The first death knell of the Genesis 1 myth came from geology, in the Eighteenth century, when a guy called James Hutton suggested that things in the past happened pretty much as the do today. This was called uniformitarianism, and stood against catastropism. Nowadays, we accept that the landscape is shaped by both gradual processes and by catastrophes.

Gish does not say any more than that. Thereis the unspoken suggestion that this means the global flood happened, though he never mentions such an event explicitly.

VII. The Inception of the Earth and of Living Kinds May Have Been Relatively Recent.

First, Gish rubbishes radiometric dating, then he suggests other indicators of a young Earth. Several of these point to an Earth old that the few thousand years he presumably believes, but that is not to be held against him - they are all consistent with a world created by god 6000 years ago.

So let us quickly look at these indicators:

Estimating by the rate of addition of helium to the atmosphere from radioactive decay, the age of the earth appears to be about 10,000 years, even allowing for moderate helium escape. 

So this is a method based on radioactive decay, which he was just rubbishing. Can we assume the decay rates are constant, or can we not, Dr Gish?

Based on the present rate of the earth's cooling, the time required for the earth to have reached its present thermal structure seems to be only several tens of millions of years, even assuming that the earth was initially molten.

This would seem to be based on estimates by Kelvin, a brilliant thermodynamist, but who was working with limited knowledge. It is now known, for example, that radioactivity provides a heating mechanism within the Earth.

Extrapolating the observed rate of apparently exponential decay of the earth's magnetic field, the age of the earth or life seemingly could not exceed 20,000 years.

 Again, this is working with out-dated evidence. Nowadays, it is established that the magnetic field does not just decay, but actually flips north-south occasionally too (this is recorded in iron oxide in rocks).

It is ironic that Gish was arguing against uniformitarianism in VI, and yet in the very next section, he assumes uniformitarianism to try to prove his point. But where would creationism be without cherry-picking?