Le Heron et al

No Justification for Oard (2009a) Misrepresenting Le Heron et al. (2005) on Ordovician Glaciations

Kevin R. Henke, Ph.D.

May 4, 2014

My 1999 essay contains numerous examples of Mr. Oard quoting the literature out of context in Oard (1997), including several examples where I place Mr. Oard’s misrepresentations in all capitalized letters within the sentences that he did not quote, which provide the real context. Rather than deal with the serious literature abuse in Oard (1997), Oard (2009a, p. 115) tries to excuse his misbehavior by claiming:

“Henke's note of other 'distortions' occurred when I focused on particular aspects of papers without recounting their entirety, for example, focusing on striated pavements as a particular article without mentioning other supposed glaciogenic features. Was I not a creationist, it would be perfectly acceptable to limit discussion to the topic at hand - the whole point of citing literature! Anyone interested in the opinions or research pursuits of those authors is welcome to read their papers. Henke's standard would eliminate all scientific publication as we know it.”

Of course, the standards that other scientists and I use would not eliminate all scientific publications as we know it, but they would eliminate the blatant quoting out of context and other abuse of the scientific literature by Mr. Oard or anyone else, creationist or not! There's nothing wrong with citing a sentence or paragraph from a document to support a claim as long as the quotation is in context and as long as the rest of the article does not overwhelmingly refute the claim. However, Oard (1997), Oard (2009a) and Oard (2009b) are repeatedly guilty of taking a few sentences or sentence fragments from a reference that seems to support a specific point that he's trying to make and then ignoring the rest of the document that contains abundant evidence and discussions that utterly refute his Flood geology agenda. In particular, not one of the post-1999 geology documents in the bibliography of Oard (2009a) argues against Late Precambrian, Ordovician or Late Paleozoic ice or glaciers. Instead, they contain abundant evidence ignored by Oard (2009a) that demonstrate the reality of pre-Pleistocene glaciations.

As a recent example of literature abuse, Oard (2009a, p. 119) quotes the following statement from Le Heron et al. (2005, p. 76):

“However, recent sedimentological work indicates that late Ordovician (lodgement [sic]-derived) diamictitic tills are difficult to recognize from upper Ordovician rocks with many previously described examples being reinterpreted as sandy debris flows... [references omitted].”

By using this quotation, Mr. Oard is trying to claim that many Ordovician lodgment tillites are actually sandy debris flows, which are supposedly compatible with Noah’s Flood. In reality, Le Heron et al. (2005) are describing the characteristics of soft sediments under the Ordovician glaciers, but they are not questioning the existence of the Ordovician glaciers. Le Heron et al. (2005, p. 75) also make the following statement ignored by Oard (2009a), which is consistent with Late Ordovician glaciations and not with Mr. Oard's YEC agenda:

“Soft-sediment striations were formed by discontinuous, shear-induced deformation beneath an ice sheet that oscillated between warm and cold-based thermal regimes.” [my emphasis]

After belittling the critical role of glaciers in the models developed by Le Heron et al. (2005) and Deynoux and Ghienne (2004) to explain the Ordovician grooves and striations of North Africa, Oard (2009a, p. 119) proclaims:

“Either way, they were not formed by ice - leaving no direct evidence of an ice age.”

Of course, Le Heron et al. (2005), Deynoux and Ghienne (2004), Sutcliffe et al. (2005), and the 21st century literature of every other expert on the Ordovician glaciations of North Africa utterly refutes this unsupported proclamation! Le Heron et al. (2010, p. 117) even concludes the following about the two references used by Oard (2009a, p. 119):

“Studies such as those of Deynoux and Ghienne (2004) and Le Heron et al. (2005) have, in particular, discussed the assemblages of soft-sediment deformation structure that are difficult to attribute to any other process than a glacial mechanism.” [my emphasis]

It’s no wonder that Le Heron et al. (2009, p. 61) in their recent summary of ancient glaciations comes to the following conclusion, which is unlikely to ever be quoted in a young-Earth creationist (YEC) publication:

“The physical evidence for Late Ordovician glaciation in the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula is excellent.”

To further see how seriously Oard (2009a) blatantly misrepresents the current assessment of the Ordovician glaciations, see: “The Cold and Hard Evidence of Ordovician Glaciations Continues to Accumulate and Bury Flood Geology.”

So, how could Mr. Oard or anyone else continue to read these articles that provide strong evidence and arguments for pre-Pleistocene glaciations and come to the opposite conclusion that the glaciations could never have occurred? The answer lies in the use of their “biblical glasses” (Figure 4 in Oard, 2009a, p. 113), which are actually religious blinders to the truth. Said another way, Senter (2011) correctly concludes:

“The continued denial of the implications of their own [YEC] findings is an example of what I call the gorilla mindset: the attitude that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, but religious dogma says it is a gorilla, then it is a gorilla.”

References

Deynoux, M., and J.-F Ghienne. 2004. Late Ordovician Glacial Pavements Revisited: A Reappraisal of the Origin of Striated Surfaces. Terra Nova v. 16, n. 3, pp: 95-101.

Le Heron, D. P., H. A. Armstrong, C. Wilson, J. P. Howard, and L. Gindre. 2010. “Glaciation and Deglaciation of the Libyan Desert: The Late Ordovician Record”, Sedimentary Geology v. 223, n.1-2, pp. 100-125.

Le Heron, D. P., J. Craig, and J. L. Etienne. 2009. “Ancient Glaciations and Hydrocarbon Accumulations in North Africa and the Middle East”, Earth-Science Reviews v. 93, n. 3-4, pp. 47-76.

Le Heron, D. P., O. E. Sutcliffe, R. J. Whittington, and J. Craig. 2005. “The Origins of Glacially Related Soft-sediment Deformation Structures in Upper Ordovician Glaciogenic Rocks: Implication for Ice-sheet Dynamics”, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology v. 218, n. 1-2, pp. 75-103.

Oard, M.J. 1997. Ancient Ice Ages or Gigantic Submarine Landsides? Creation Research Society, Monograph No. 5, Chino Valley, AZ.

Oard, M.J. 2009a. “Landslides Win in a Landslide over Ancient 'Ice Ages'“, chapter 7 in M.J. Oard and J.K. Reed (editors). 2009. Rock Solid Answers: The Biblical Truth Behind 14 Geological Questions, Master Books: Green Forest, AR, pp. 111-123.

Oard, M.J. 2009b. “Do Varves Contradict Biblical History?”, chapter 8 in M.J. Oard and J.K. Reed (editors). 2009. Rock Solid Answers: The Biblical Truth Behind 14 Geological Questions, Master Books: Green Forest, AR, pp. 125-148.

Senter, P. 2011. “The Defeat of Flood Geology by Flood Geology”, Reports of the National Center for Science Education, v. 31, n. 3, 1.1. http://reports.ncse.com/index.php/rncse/index

Sutcliffe, O. E., J. Craig, and R. Whittington. 2005. Late Ordovician Glacial Pavements Revisited: A Reappraisal of the Origin of Striated Surfaces. Terra Nova v. 17, n. 5, pp: 486-487.