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Opal Formation – An Example of “Creationist” Research3 min read

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OpalOne evolutionary canard I am tired of is the "you can’t design scientific experiments on Creationism."  In part, they say this because they do not understand creation science, holding to a charicature of if that suits their willful ignorance.  In part, they say this because they truly do not see their own faith suppositions and assumptions, and therefore, are truly unable to rightly evalutate anyone else’s.  To be clear, biblical creationism isn’t "if we can’t understand it, God must have done it," (God in the gaps), but rather, we believe things like:

  • everthing was fully formed and perfect from the start, and has been degenerating since then (from order to chaos) following the law of entropy, rather than moving from chaos to order.
  • the geographical strata do not represent millions of years of accumulation, but represent short periods of catastrophic activity, including but not limited to a global flood

From such ideas, we would predict historical evidence for such things as man and dinosaur co-existing, naturalistic methods for the rapid formation of coal and other deposits, no such thing as vestigial organs or "junk" DNA, the existence of ancient bones of modern humans etc.  And some of these have been discovered.

So along these lines, I just read this fascinating post about the formation of opal, and how a scientist in Australia has shown that it takes months to years to form, not millions of years as supposed.  The fact that that the scientist was not limited by conventional, old-earth, anti-Noahic flood theory was part of what helped him make his discovery.  Here are some interesting snippets:

Current scientific theory, based on the geologists’ uniformitarian belief in slow and gradual processes over millions of years, states that opal formation was a sedimentary process….But Len has proved that the opal formation process is probably very different to this. In his jars, the first touch of colour appears within 15 minutes! In three months he gets more than one centimetre (half an inch) of vertical growth. Len says the longest part is the drying-out process, as the water contained within the developing opal structure is expelled over subsequent months and years. The actual formation of the opal takes only a very short time (only a matter of weeks).

Len says that he has succeeded because he was prepared to look at the scientific problem completely unshackled by evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions—an attitude different from that of other scientists.

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