Inductive Reductive Circular Reasoning

But avoid foolish questions, and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and vain.

(Titus 3:9) KJV

Supposedly, distant stellar objects are so large that they have to be very far away.  Either that or they’re so far away that they have to be very large. It’s a phenomenon we call the geometry of despair.

Here’s where it gets really clever: Two circles of reasoning can now be merged with each other by THEREFORE such that it appears that they provide mutual support for each other.

Arbitrarily designating the size of the stellar objects allows us to say that they’re so far away that the light from them takes millions of years to reach us. Spectra of these distant objects shows that the ratios of radioisotopes are what we would expect if nuclear decay has always been constant. THEREFORE, if radioisotopes decayed at the same rate millions of years ago as they do now, this confirms the validity of the experimental procedure we use to get dates from rocks showing that they’re millions of years old.

In theory this proves that the Earth is billions of years old. However, this started with the premise that the Earth is billions of years old. It’s an example of inductive reductive circular reasoning. None of it is a testable hypothesis, so none of it is scientific.

Inductive Reductive Circular Reasoning

• By assuming heliocentricity we can use stellar parallax to confirm heliocentricity.
• We also assume that stars are distant suns and galaxies (synonymy).
• By assuming that stars are distant suns we can use the assumption of heliocentricity to calculate vastly inflated distances to them.
• The vastly inflated distances may be used with stellar spectroscopy to support the assumption of an ancient Earth (needed for biological evolution) as follows:
  1. spectra show that radioisotope ratios in stars match the ratios we measure on Earth,
  2. by assuming that the light has traveled for billions of years across the distances contrived by assuming heliocentricity,
  3. this supports the assumption that the rate of nuclear decay has been constant for billions of years.

Brilliant, right? This is especially clever because occasionally an atheist science troll (AST) has enough wherewithal to make the point that this isn’t circular reasoning because there are two disparate branches of science that support each other. They fail to grasp that although the two branches of science may be different disciplines, they both developed within the same paradigm.

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