I’ve had a hard time finding detailed scientific predictions of Creationism online. But I’ve culled these from Walt Brown’s Center for Scientific Creationism. Most of these predictions are come out of his Hydroplate Theory, so they mostly have to do with the flood, the earth’s crust and age, and some astronomical predictions – only the last few deal w/ the fossil record. But it’s a place to start. He also has a nice chart (right) comparing the various theories and how they explain what we observe with respect to mammoth fossils. PREDICTION 1: Beneath major mountains are large volumes of pooled salt water.47 (Recent discoveries support this prediction, first made in 1980. Salt water appears to be about 10 miles below the Tibetan Plateau, which is bounded on the south by the largest mountain range on earth.)48
PREDICTION 2: Salty water will be found within cracks in granite, 5-10 miles below the earth’s surface (where surface water should not be able to penetrate).
PREDICTION 3: The crystalline rock under Gibraltar, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, and the Golden Gate bridge will be found to be eroded into a V-shaped notch. (This prediction concerning the Bosporus and Dardanelles, first published in 1995, was confirmed in 1998.)57
PREDICTION 4: The Global Positioning System (GPS) measures plate velocities with ever increasing accuracy as data accumulates and equipment improves. Because the earth’s crust is shifting toward equilibrium, today’s plate velocities will be found to be very gradually decreasing.
PREDICTION 5: Fracture zones and axial and flank rifts will always be along lines of high magnetic intensity.
PREDICTION 6: The magnetic intensity above hydrothermal vents slowly increases because the rock below, fractured since the flood a few thousand years ago, is cooling.
PREDICTION 7: A 10-mile-thick granite layer (a hydroplate) will be found a mile or so under the western Pacific floor.
PREDICTION 8: Fossils of land animals, not just shallow-water plant fossils, will be found in and near trenches.
PREDICTION 9: Precise measurements of the center of the western Pacific floor will show it is rising relative to sea level and the center of the earth, because plates are still shifting.
PREDICTION 10: When greater precision is achieved in measuring the inner core’s rotational speed, it will be found to be slowing relative to the rest of the earth.
PREDICTION 11: A well-designed blind test will not support McDougall’s age sequences for seven Hawaiian volcanoes.
PREDICTION 12: Corings taken anywhere in the bottom of any large lake will not show laminations as thin, parallel, and extensive as the varves of the Green River formation, perhaps the best known of all varve deposits
PREDICTION 13: High concentrations of loess particles will be found in the bottom several hundred feet of most ice cores drilled in Antarctica and Greenland.
PREDICTION 14: Muck on Siberian plateaus should have a wide range of thicknesses. The greatest thickness will be in former valleys. Preflood hilltops will have the thinnest layers of muck. Drilling or seismic reflection techniques should confirm this.
PREDICTION 15: Rock ice will be found to be salty.141
Bubbles in rock ice will be found to contain less air and much more carbon dioxide than normally in ice bubbles formed today.
PREDICTION 17: Dirt and organic particles in rock ice will closely resemble those in the overlying muck.
PREDICTION 18: One should not find marine fossils, layered strata, oil, coal seams, or limestone directly beneath undisturbed rock ice or frozen mammoth carcasses.143
PREDICTION 19: Blind radiocarbon dating of different parts of the same mammoth will continue to give radiocarbon ages that differ by more than statistical variations would reasonably permit. [Page 87 describes blind testing.] Contamination by ground water will be most easily seen if the samples came from widely separated parts of the mammoth’s body with different water-absorbing characteristics.
PREDICTION 20: Soil in “erosion” channels on Mars will contain traces of soluble compounds, such as salt from Earth’s preflood subterranean chambers. Soil far from “erosion” channels will not. (This prediction was first published in April 2001. Salt was discovered on Mars in March 2004.72)
PREDICTION 21: The number of near-parabolic comets passing perihelion each decade will be found to be diminishing slightly. This effect will be seen as better telescopes, more searchers, and higher quality data allow adjustments to be made for our increasing ability to see comets.
PREDICTION 22: Some large, near-parabolic comets, as they fall toward the center of the solar system for the first time, will reveal moons acquired as the comets formed. Tidal effects may strip such moons from their comets as they pass the Sun. (A moon may have been found orbiting incoming comet Hale-Bopp.)76
PREDICTION 23: The equivalent of Jupiter’s mass is thinly distributed 40–600 AU from the Sun.
PREDICTION 24: Because the solar system should be slightly “heavier” than previously thought, some strange comet pairs listed in Table 15 are a single comet on successive orbital passes. More “strange pairs” will be found each decade. Probably the comet sightings of 1785 and 1898 were of the same comet. [See Table 15.] If so, it will return in about 2012.
PREDICTION 25: Excess heavy hydrogen will be found in salty water pockets five or more miles below the Earth’s surface.
PREDICTION 26: Spacecraft landing on a comet will find that comets, and therefore bodies bombarded by comets, such as Mars, contain loess (see page 185), traces of vegetation and bacteria, and about twice the salt concentration of our oceans.
PREDICTION 27: The Oort cloud will never be seen, because it does not exist.
PREDICTION 28: No incoming hyperbolic comet will ever be seen, because comets originated from Earth, not outside the solar system.
PREDICTION 29: Argon is concentrated in the outer few meters of a comet’s crust. Four percent of a comet, by mass, is chlorine and almost three percent is sodium, the other constituent of salt.
PREDICTION 30: Asteroids are rock piles, often with ice acting as a weak “glue” deep inside. Large rocks that began the capture process are nearer the centers of asteroids. Comets, which are primarily ice, have rocks in their cores.
PREDICTION 31: Individual rocks comprising asteroids will be found to be magnetized.
PREDICTION 32: Rocks in asteroids are typical of the Earth’s crust. Expensive efforts to mine asteroids27 to recover strategic or precious metals will be a waste of money.
PREDICTION 33: Ceres, the largest asteroid, will be found to have a very Earthlike spin.
PREDICTION 34: Most sediments taken from layered strata on Mars and returned to Earth will show that they were deposited through Mars’ atmosphere, not through water. (Under a microscope, water deposited grains have nicks and gouges, showing that they received many blows as they tumbled along stream bottoms. Sediments deposited through an atmosphere receive few nicks.)
PREDICTION 35: As has been discovered on the Moon and apparently on Mercury, frost will be found within asteroids and in permanently shadowed craters on Mars. All of this frost will be rich in heavy hydrogen. [See pages 215 and 224.]
PREDICTION 36: Bones or other organic remains that contain enough carbon and are believed by evolutionists to be older than 100,000 years will be shown to be relatively young in blind radiocarbon tests. This prediction, first published in the 6th Edition (1995), p. 157, has now been confirmed.11 (Blind tests are explained on page 87.)
Hydroplate theory is pretty weak. The idea that the crust of the earth is floating on water is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, and I don't know of a single geologist who supports it (Brown is not, incidentally, a geologist). You ought to read some criticisms of Brown's work here.
I will read criticisms of his work, thanks. I did not say, btw, that these predictions were validated, or complete, or even my own. However, they are testable, which is what evolutionists are complaining is lacking.
And btw, I am not surprised that criticisms exist – the question is, how good are his predictions?
Seeker, I think you misunderstand something. It’s not that critics of creationism believe that theories about the Flood, for example, are untestable. Most of us think that they are testable, and in fact we think that the core ideas have already been tested, and all the evidence shows that they’re false.
What isn’t testable is the theory that God exists and has done anything at all to affect the course of history, which is the crux of Creationist thinking.
Even if all of Walt Brown’s theories proved true (and that seems pretty unlikely to me, given the absurdity of “hydroplate” theory) you still couldn’t say that it was Creationism per se. The ultimate test of “creationism” is whether or not God actually created anything. And, of course, that’s not a test that can ever be run, is it?
I think you are wrong. The crux of creationist thinking is that all things appeared fully formed, and have been degenerating since then, not improving (against the tide of entropy) as evolution claims.
The person of the creator is a matter of faith, not science. But the claim of the act of creation and the “slowing universe”, as well as the other biblical claims such as the noahic flood are all matters for historians and scienctists to investigate.
You are correct that we can not observe the creation event, but neither can we observe macroevolution or abiogenesis (though we could observe the last event if it was possible, but it sure hasn’t until now).
Interestingly, how could you falsify the claim of abiogenesis? That would be important in establishing it as a valid theory.
You can play around with the phrasing and the specifics all you like, but the crux of Creationism is the creator. It does not exist without a creator, and the presence of a creator is not a scientifically tenable theory. To say that creationism is, itself, testable, entirely ignores this fact.
Abiogenesis is not, incidently, a given in science. Nobody is claiming that it's an undeniable truth. It's just one theory among many, and it happens to be one that a lot of scientists think is more probable than anything else we've currently got on the table. Like, say, spontaneous generation by an invisible man in the sky.
In legitimate, useful science we posit explanatory models and then we wait until new findings prove the old models wrong. Creationists, on the other hand, rely on revealed truths and staunchly refuse to accept new data on the subject. And if you think that's an unfair characterization, refute it by telling me what sort of a discovery could convince you that the Earth was actually billions years old? What sort of a discovery could convince you that every modern species is not actually descended from Noah's bizarrely improbable collection?
And if you think that’s an unfair characterization, refute it by telling me what sort of a discovery could convince you that the Earth was actually billions years old?
Well, perhaps you are not aware of OECs. Old Earth Creationists like Hugh Ross at Reasons to Believe actually believe in an old earth. In fact, starting Jan 15th, they will be seen in a series of nine short debate segments with YEC’s from Answers in Genenesis on the John Ankerberg show.
Both YECs and OECs routinely work to square new scientific data with their models, adjusting their models accordingly, just like evolutionists do. Your accusation about not accepting new data is false – what they don’t accept is the evolutionary interpretation of the data, since it is often based on questionable assumptions (i.e. unreasonable, doubtful assumptions).
But listen. Evolution depends on abiogenesis the way Creationism depends on a creation event. Both are unprovable assumptions. But that does not keep them from explaining how we got to the present from that starting point. In fact, all theories of origins must start with an unprovable assumption. Your faith is in one, mine in the other.
Focusing on this foundational assumption to evaluate the entire model is not intellectually sound. Even if we disagree with one another’s faith presumptions, we should rather focus on the models themselves – how well do they incorporate known historical and scientific data, and how well do they predict future disocveries? This is where I think the creation model outshines the evolution model.
One other thing – I think we need to agree that certain “proven” mechanisms, like adaptation, speciation, and natural selection are compatible with both models – neither can claim these as evidence for the truth of their position (even though evolution may claim natural selection as one of the drivers of its model).
I'll certainly agree with you, that adaptation, speciation, and natural selection are all technically compatible with the idea that a god created the world. Deism, especially, is compatible with all essentially forms of science. I don't think it's a likely theory, but it's definitely a conceivable one.
Evolution does not depend on abiogenesis. Abiogenesis is simply the most likely solution to the big question that's been considered so far, and fits with what we currently know about the chemistry of life. We don't have all the answers, clearly, but it's the best model we have so far. It's a far cry better than saying "It must have been magic!"
You continually try to draw a connection between your faith in your god, and my beliefs in modern science. They are not the same. My beliefs are not faith at all. I do not claim that evolution, for example, is an indisputable fact. Neither do I claim that Einstein's theory of relativity, the theory of magnetism, or even the heliocentric model of the solar system are indisputable truths. They're theories. They're models. I don't have any faith in them at all, beyond what I can logically understand about them.
I happen to think that they're all very strong theories, and that they're probably very accurate, but if you were to give me good reason to believe otherwise, I'd follow the evidence and switch models.
Your faith, I suspect, is nothing like that.
You suspect wrong. Even when I left and lost my xian faith for 10 years, I did not lose my confidence in the creation model and my serious doubts about evolution because of the science involved and the data I reviewed.
But I will say it again – Creation science is as much a valid model as evolution, in that both depend on a foundational belief in something unobservable and unprovable. All other proposed processes since that original event (abiogenesis or creation) can and should be subject to historical and scientific analysis – and I find macroevolution to be quite an incredible leap of faith from the data we have, and I believe it to go against natural law and processes. Not because the bible says so, but because evolutionary theorists have gone way past science into philosophy and usubstantiated beliefs about how things occurred, and contrary to much of the data, IMHO.
Anyway, I continue to assert that Creation science can be practiced as a valid world view and science, and it’s deist creationist assumptions do not disqualify it from presenting a scientific model that can be tested. To assert that it is merely religion is narrow minded materialism cloaked in scientific garb.