Originally Posted by VoxPopuli

I’m not all that concerned with YEC or OEC or EV conflicts personally but I do find it disconcerting when the effort put into a evaluating a position or assertion does not seem to match the confidence level.

The article clearly states that the amber was prepared by a jeweler in order to make a piece of jewelery. This means that the piece of amber was not raw but had had the surface oxidation was removed, it was shaped and polished. Raw amber is not smooth and polished and yes frequently it is not translucent at all until you remove the oxidized surface. This makes the author of the article seem lazy and thoughtless.

I don’t know what universal law of entropy the author is referring to but if they are referring to the second law of thermodynamics then it is completely irrelevant to their argument. Why not get a grasp on some basic scientific concepts before bandying them about or rejecting them. Again this makes the author look lazy or ignorant.

FYI, I got this from ICR the other day.

Thank you for your message and your interest in the work of ICR. I forwarded your message to the author. His reply is below.

Beth Mull, Senior Editor
Institute for Creation Research

Proclaiming Scientific Truth in Creation

Dear Mr. *****

Thank you for your appreciation for ICR.

I disagree that this skeptic has a point in accusing this article of “lazy or ignorant research.” Whereas I’m not perfect and have made errors, my approach has not been sloppy here. My article did not claim that only the outer surface of ambers darken and that polishing would remove it. Rather, one could extrapolate the known darkening rate of ambers held in museum collections over a century (see references in amber wings article) to easily conclude that ambers should become opaque throughout in a million years. And most ambers have not. Therefore, ambers shouldn’t be a million years old, let alone 100 million. Polishing has nothing to do with darkening. One only needs time and a world (with oxygen).

We welcome feedback and corrections, but I see no discrepancy at all between what I wrote and the Nature article (that I had of course studied before I wrote my article). Yes, the amber was already polished. My point perhaps could have been worded more clearly that even after polishing, this and any other amber that was actually millions of years old should have turned opaque throughout, concealing all inclusions.

In my view, the sloppiness here stems from trying to make our sentence say something it does not express.

Brian