The Parable of the Contraption

There was a small town out in the desert. One morning a man was walking in the desert and he came upon a contraption in the middle of nowwhere. He had lived there all his life but he had never seen this contraption before. The contraption consisted of a big vat with sand in it and above that vat was another vat with sand in it. The vat on top had a rubber diaphragm on the bottom with a hole in it and sand was coming out of the top vat and into the bottom vat. Some of the parts were rusty so it looked like it had been there for a long time.

He went into town and told his friends about the contraption. No one had heard about it or seen it before, so they went out to look at it. They all wondered how and when this contraption got there since no one had seen it before. There was a scientist in town who came out to the contraption. He measured how much sand was in the vats and the rate at which the sand was going from the top vat to the bottom vat. He then punched in some numbers into his calculator and he came up with an age of 60 years. This was the talk of the town that this contraption had been there for 60 years and no one had seen it before.

Everyone believed that it was 60 years old because it had been scientifically proven. Later someone found a journal at the contraption by the person that had built it. That person was a resident of the town but was out of town at present. The father of the person looked at the journal and said "yes, that was his son's handwriting". The problem was that the journal said that the contraption had only been there for 6 days. Some people did not believe the journal was written by the person who created the contraption because it had been proven scientifically that it was 60 years old. Other people believed that the journal was written by the person who created the contraption but that maybe the person's word day really meant 10 years so 6 days translates to 60 years. That way they could believe the journal and also accept the scientific fact that it was 60 years old.

The next day the person that had created the contraption returned to town. He confirmed that he had built the contraption a week earlier. The people said that the scientist had calculated that the contraption had been there for 60 years. The scientist had assumed that the bottom vat was empty when the contraption was started but the man confirmed that the bottom vat already had sand in it when he started it. The scientist assumed that the rate he observed was the rate it had always been. The creator of the contraption explained that the diaphragm was stretched out the first 3 days so the rate was much faster at first. The scientist assumed that no sand was added to the system after it was started. The creator of the contraption said that he had added some sand on day 4 before he left town.

The scientist had made some unprovable assumptions since he wasn't there when it was built he had no way of knowing how much sand was in the vats when it started. He also didn't know if the rate had changed in the past. He had to make these assumption in order to do his calculations. His calculations were right but his assumptions were wrong therefore his answer was wrong. The sad thing about this parable is that there were still people in the town that believed the contraption was 60 years old because it was a scientifically proven fact even though the creator of the contraption had told them that it was only 6 days old.

This parable relates to radiometric dating that says that the earth is 4.5 billion years old. According to a lot of people this is a proven fact. Radiometric dating is done using radioactive isotopes such as Uranium. Uranium decays at a rate called it's half-life into lead. Scientist measure how much uranium and lead are in a sample of rock. Using it's rate of decay (half-life) they calculate the age of the rock. But they have to make the same assumptions the scientist did in the parable. They assume the there was no lead in the sample when it first became solid from it's liquid form (i.e. volcanic rock) and all the lead came from the decay of uranium. They also assume that the rate of decay has been the same throughout time. They also assume no lead or uranium was added or taken away after the rock was formed. The scientist have to make these assumptions in order to do their calculations. These are unprovable assumptions because they weren't there when the rock formed or throughout it's history. There have been some scientist that have taken rocks formed from Mt. St. Helen when it erupted in 1980. These rocks were of known age because they were only about 30 years old. They took them to a reputable lab that does this type of dating but didn't tell them where the rock came from. The lab dated the rock at several million years old. This was done with rocks from other volcanos with know dates and all came back in the millions even billions of years old when the oldest sample was just a couple of hundred years old. There are other isotopes that are used (i.e. Potassium and argon, etc.) but they all have the same assumptions. If the dating methods cannot be trusted with rocks of known age why do they trust them with rocks of unknown age? Evolutionist have a worldview that the earth has to be billions of years old for evolution to even be feasiable. The ages given by radiometric dating fit into their worldview so they just accept (by faith) that it is true and ignore the real scientific evidense.