Argument from Ignorance

And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.

(Genesis 3:8) NKJV

Popular science (SciPop) doesn’t have any positive confirmation for the hypothesis that nuclear decay rates have always been constant. What’s a paradigm to do in a situation like this? Go for negative confirmation.

When the alternative is considered, a variable decay rate, SciPop anticipates that this would cause a result that we don’t observe, a negative inference, and this is taken as a positive proof of the hypothesis.

Radioactive decay at a rate fast enough to permit a young earth would have produced enough heat to melt the earth.

(Meert 2002). From Claim CF210

The problem here is the anticipated result, which isn’t observed, is based on assuming the original premise, that Earth is ancient, to be correct without considering that there may be a very good alternative explanation which is a predictive testable hypothesis. As such the only rationale available to support the premise of constant nuclear decay rates is an argument from ignorance.

Argument from ignorance (from Latin: argumentum ad ignorantiam), also known as appeal to ignorance (in which ignorance represents “a lack of contrary evidence”), is a fallacy in informal logic. It asserts that a proposition is true because it has not yet been proven false or a proposition is false because it has not yet been proven true.

– Argument from Ignorance (Wikipedia)

The use of the decay constant to estimate the age of the Earth is a logical fallacy.

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