Chapter 38. Gentry's Halos

On a Sabbath morning in June I drove about an hour and a half north of the city to Camp Berkshire for Campmeeting. The main auditorium was packed. The morning service in the gym program dragged on and on as campmeeting services usually do. After church, I wandered the grounds to see if I could find anyone I knew. I saw a few old friends from the Crossroads Church, and, of course, a few people from the German Church, but walking around in the damp, cool weather felt like moving through a sea of strangers.

After lunch I attended a presentation by Robert Gentry in the youth building. The audience filled the building and spilled out the doors. I was mesmerized.

Gentry had worked as a physicist at a U. S. government lab in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where he investigated a phenomenon called pleochroic halos. These “halos” are little spheres are created by the radioactive decay in granite. They show up as haloes in cross section. Gentry explained how the halos were formed and where they were found.

Looking around at the audience, I wondered how much of his presentation they understood. Had they ever heard of alpha and beta decay? Did they comprehend the concept of “half life?” Whether they understood or not, they were captivated by the presentation. Biotite, zircons and thin sections might been just words to many of the people listening, but one thing they knew for sure: Mr. Gentry had found the silver bullet to kill the evolution monster. He was a scientist, and he was on their side. I was thrilled along with everyone else.

Gentry had not done his work at a Bible college. He worked at Oakridge National Laboratory. He had published articles about his research in these halos in Nature and Science. He was a bona fide scientist. I was impressed.

Listening to Gentry, I recalled an old preacher from North Carolina who came to Highland Academy when I was a high school student. He brought a car full of fossils and spread them out on tables at the rear of the chapel. In his speech, he regaled us with stories of finding fossils in places where they weren’t supposed to be. He told of finding mammal fossils in rock layers that were supposed to have only dinosaurs. He found trilobites in rock layers that were supposed to have been formed long after the trilobites went extinct. He would show his finds to scientists and they would be dumb-founded by his discoveries.

The point of his presentation was that the supposed order of the fossil record didn’t hold up to honest investigation. And, of course, belief in evolution was based precisely on that putative order. The preacher made fun of the scientists who dated rock layers. Rock layers were dated by fossils and fossils were dated by rock layers. It was completely circular reasoning.

After his lecture we were invited to examine his specimens. Trilobites, fossilized shark teeth, beautifully preserved fish and leaves, dinosaur tracks, a saber-toothed tiger skull. It was a mesmerizing collection. I dreamed of finding my own fossil treasures, of finding the final, decisive evidence in the rocks that would force the scientific establishment to change its understanding of earth history.

Still, I was troubled by the preacher’s cavalier dismissal of science as a discipline and scientists as a community. Surely not all scientists were as dogmatic and dishonest as he implied. And I was a little puzzled. Why couldn’t the thousands of scientists who were looking for fossils find any of the anomalies that he was finding everywhere?

On the other hand I couldn’t believe this preacher was making up his discoveries. He had them right here, spread out on tables for us to examine. And he wasn’t the only one making these kinds of discoveries. I had heard about the discovery of human footprints in a rock layer that also contained dinosaur footprints–exactly what you would expect if fossils were formed during the flood.

As encouraging as I found the presentation by the preacher and others like him, I could never quite escape my own skepticism about evidence that only creationists could find. If the evidence for a recent creation was really there, then surely some regular scientists would find it. And at least a few scientists would have the guts to publish it.

Listening to Gentry I thought, Finally! A real scientist, publishing in real scientific journals, has found hard evidence of creation.

After explaining the halos in layman’s language and detailing the determined refusal by the scientific establishment to investigate his findings, Gentry moved to the climax of his lecture. Since the halos were evenly distributed throughout blocks of granite, the original radioactive atoms must have been there from the beginning. They could not have been transported into the granite by the movement of atoms in solution. And since the mother atoms have a very short half life, the granite must have been formed miraculously in a very short time–in a matter of minutes–and not through an eons-long process as conventional geology taught.

Gentry insisted instantaneous creation was the only plausible explanation of the phenomenon. While other scientists had criticized his work on general principles—Gentry's work had to be wrong because it contradicted established theory—none had presented any research-based alternative to Gentry's explanations. The critics had suggested the mother atoms were transported into the granite, but Gentry said his research had ruled that out. He was eager for more scientists to examine the halos because the evidence right there in the rocks would eventually force a re-working of the orthodox understanding of the formation of granite and the age of the earth.

Once you recognized that granite did not form over millions of years of slow cooling, this would require rethinking all sorts of related questions in geochronology. It would create a revolution in geology, a paradigm shift. In this new world of geology, perhaps scientists would have the honesty and perspicaciousness to recognize the truth of the Bible account.

Because Gentry argued on the basis of physics and mineralogy, citing experimental evidence that could be replicated, his arguments seemed very strong. This was not speculative. This was not interpretation of once-upon-a-time events like the fossilization of dinosaurs or the creation of birds–events no one saw involving processes we have never observed producing effects that we cannot replicate. No, Gentry was making his case based on phenomena that could be studied in the lab. The decay rates of polonium were short enough that people could reasonably attempt to replicate the formation of the halos in the lab. Besides that, further study of a sufficient number of samples could determine if the halos were in fact evenly distributed in granite. The half-life of the mother products could be measured. Alternative decay paths could be ruled out. Even the formation of granite itself could be investigated. Scientists could make molten stews of the appropriate minerals and cool them at different rates and pressures to see if granite formed from the mixture.

Gentry cautioned us not to get our hopes up. He spent a fair amount of time detailing the animosity he had experienced from other scientists. As the implications of his research came to be more widely recognized, journals were refusing to publish his research. They were even refusing to publish his letters rebutting inaccurate references to his work. The bias in the scientific establishment was entrenched and apparently unassailable. But he vowed to continue his work as long as he could find the funds to do so. The quest for truth must go on.

Leaving the campground, I was elated. Finally, here was the silver bullet I had been dreaming of. Solid, non-speculative, non-theoretical, concrete evidence that countered the irresistible onslaught of conventional geochronology. The Bible was true. My church was right.

(The trickiest part of writing a memoir is remembering! I vividly remember listening to Gentry's presentation at Camp Berkshire. I am rather uncertain about what year this happened--1972, 1979 or 80. I'm sure there are other details equally susceptible to my "creative" memory.)