Creationist Arguments That Were Withdrawn

"Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system." — Andrew Snelling and David Rush, 1993¹

Summary

This is a register.  Each entry gives an argument young-earth creationists once made, in its proponents' own words at its peak;  the evidence that undid it;  who withdrew it and how, in the words of the withdrawal;  who still uses it;  and whether the withdrawal was right.  Where a sibling article already weighs the evidence in full, the entry gives the verdict and links there.  Failed predictions are scored separately in Successful Creationist Predictions.

The findings:

1. The movement's own scientists did almost all of the withdrawing. Of twelve arguments tracked here, every first withdrawal came from a young-earth creationist writing in a young-earth venue: Snelling and Rush on moon dust (1993), DeYoung and Rush on the shrinking Sun (1989), Aardsma and Humphreys on decaying light speed (1988), Newton on solar neutrinos (2002), Berney Neufeld (1975) and then John Morris (1986) on the Paluxy tracks, Chadwick on Burdick's Precambrian pollen (1981), Wise and later Clarey on the Lewis Overthrust (1986, 2013), Faulkner on missing supernova remnants (2017), Jerlström on the Zuiyo-maru "plesiosaur" (1998), Halley on the Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" (2025), and the don't-use list itself on the canopy and the coal finds.^2341567 Outside critics had often reached the same answer earlier, and Glen Kuban's site visits of 1985 drove the Paluxy withdrawal,⁸ but every retraction was written from inside.
2. It took about nineteen years on median. From first print in a creationist source to first withdrawal by a creationist, the twelve lags run from about 5 years (solar neutrinos) to about 40 (the vapour canopy, the coal artefacts), with a median of 19. The fastest withdrawals came where one decisive check could be run: the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory's results of 2001 and 2002, and Aardsma's weighted refit of the 1987 light-speed data within a year of its publication.⁹
3. The organisations lagged their scientists, and their lists cover only part of the record. The one standing list, "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use," began at Answers in Genesis (earliest surviving copy December 2001, 33 entries) and is now kept by Creation Ministries International (44 entries).¹⁰¹¹ It carries 7 of the 12 arguments here. It does not carry the shrinking Sun, Burdick's pollen, the Lewis Overthrust, the missing supernova remnants or Ta Prohm. The Institute for Creation Research keeps no such list; it states a standard instead.¹²¹³
4. The list has only grown, and its tiers have moved both ways. Every one of the 33 entries of December 2001 is still on the page in 2026. Dated archive copies show the solar-neutrino entry added between December 2001 and 2005, the canopy hardened from "doubtful" to "definitely not be used" between April and October 2016, living dinosaurs added in early 2018, and the Paluxy tracks moved down, from "definitely not" to "doubtful," between March and May 2024, with the wording unchanged.^14151617 That last move is not explained on the page.
5. Eight of the twelve are still in circulation somewhere. Moon dust, the shrinking Sun, solar neutrinos and the Lewis Overthrust denial have effectively stopped.¹⁸ The canopy survives in a study Bible and on a museum site; decaying light speed in its author's own later work; the Paluxy tracks on pages carrying Don Patton's material; the coal artefacts on creation-museum pages; the Hakatai pollen on the Creation Research Society's website; living plesiosaurs and the Ta Prohm "stegosaurus" in Answers in Genesis's 2025 evidence register; and the missing supernova remnants on all three large ministries' sites.
6. Every withdrawal examined here was right on the evidence. None was a loss of nerve. Several were too gentle: the c-decay entry is still filed as merely "doubtful," and the Paluxy entry was softened in 2024 although nothing in the evidence changed.
7. The record answers both caricatures. "Creationists never retract" is false; they retracted these arguments, publicly and at cost, and in several cases, such as the Hakatai pollen and the light-speed refit, creationists did the decisive work themselves. "The movement corrects itself" is also too generous: retraction travels from journals to websites slowly and incompletely, and the people still using these arguments are named below.

Verdict:  real self-correction, done mostly by working scientists inside the movement, followed by slow, partial and uneven uptake by its organisations and almost none by its museums, study Bibles and independent speakers.

Part 1: The lists, and what they record

Who keeps a list

One list does most of the work.  Answers in Genesis put up "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use" as a question-and-answer page.  The earliest copy in the Internet Archive is dated 15 December 2001.  It already had two tiers, "Which arguments should definitely not be used?" and "What arguments are doubtful, hence inadvisable to use?", and 33 entries.¹⁰  When the Australian and American arms of the ministry separated, the page went with the Australians, now Creation Ministries International, where Jonathan Sarfati maintains it at creation.com under a first-published date of 7 February 2006.¹¹  Answers in Genesis now keeps a topic page called "Arguments to Avoid" with articles on single arguments but no tiers and no dates.¹⁹

The preface has barely changed in twenty-five years.  The 2001 version said that "many of these arguments have never been promoted by AiG, and some have not been promoted by any major creationist organization and are instead straw men set up by anti-creationists."¹⁰  The current one says the same of CMI and gives the reason for the whole exercise:

"Persisting in using discredited arguments simply rebounds—it's the truth that sets us free (John 8:32), not error, and Christ is "the truth" (John 14:6)!  Since there is so much good evidence for creation, there is no need to use any of the 'doubtful' arguments."¹¹

The straw-man caveat matters for counting.  Most of the 44 entries are not scientific arguments at all.  Some are folk claims that no creationist scientist made:  the NASA "missing day," Darwin's deathbed conversion, a faked moon landing, a flat earth, a rib missing from men.  Others are readings of Scripture (the Gospel in the stars, Peleg and the continents) or debating phrases ("evolution is just a theory").  They are on the list because laymen use them, and this article does not count them as withdrawn arguments.  The register below takes only the arguments that creationist writers printed as science.

The Institute for Creation Research has no list.¹²  Its position is a standard rather than a register.  Jason Lisle, then its director of physical sciences, wrote in 2017:

"The evidence in question may be plausible but insufficiently supported at present.  If we are going to tell someone what to believe, it's not good enough to simply suspect or suppose that the premise in question is true.  We must know that it is true."¹³

The first test of the list: Kent Hovind

The list was tested within a year.  On 12 August 2002 the evangelist Kent Hovind published a reply defending several entries, including the coal artefacts and Carl Baugh's evidences.  Answers in Genesis answered him point by point on 11 October 2002 in "Maintaining Creationist Integrity."²⁰  The 2001 list had already named him:  "there are talented creationist speakers with reasonably orthodox understandings of Genesis (e.g. Kent Hovind) who continue to promote some of the Wyatt and Baugh 'evidences' despite being approached on the matter."¹⁰  In November 2009 CMI added a note that Hovind's ministry website "no longer espouses a number of the "don't use arguments" defended by Kent Hovind in 2002," and that "there are lots of "free-to-copy" DVDs of Kent Hovind's old talks circulating widely around the world and it will be some time before they disappear from circulation."²⁰

That note describes the whole problem this article measures.  A ministry can correct its website.  It cannot recall a DVD.

What the dated copies show

The page carries no change log.  Its history has to be read from archived copies, and this article compared the December 2001 and 2005 copies of the Answers in Genesis page with copies of the CMI page from 2012, April 2016, October 2016, 2017, January and June 2018, 2022, 2023, March, May and August 2024, and September and October 2026.²¹

Nothing has been deleted.  All 33 entries of December 2001 are on the 2026 page.²¹  The list grows and occasionally re-tiers.  It never says when or why.

The Paluxy move deserves a sentence of its own.  From at least December 2001 to March 2024 the tracks sat among the arguments that "should definitely not be used."  Between March and May 2024 they moved to "doubtful, hence inadvisable to use," with the entry's text, including "Research to date has not been promising about the tracks," left exactly as it was.¹⁷  No new Paluxy evidence appeared in 2024.  The likeliest reading is an editorial regrouping, since the doubtful tier now opens with the related dinosaur entries, but the page does not say, and a reader comparing copies sees a softening without a reason.

Part 2: The register, sky and Sun

1. Moon dust

At its peak.  The Genesis Flood (1961) took the oceanographer Hans Pettersson's estimate that "14,300,000 tons of such dust—settles to earth each year."²³  Henry Morris's Scientific Creationism (1974) did the arithmetic and carried it to the Moon:  over five billion years there "should have accumulated … a layer of meteoritic dust approximately 182 feet thick all over the world!  There is not the slightest sign of such a dust layer anywhere of course.  On the moon's surface it should be at least as thick, but the astronauts found no sign of it."²⁴

What undid it.  The input.  Andrew Snelling and David Rush spent years collecting every measurement of the influx, from satellite detectors, deep-sea sediments, lunar microcraters and the lunar soil itself, and found that most estimates for the Earth run 10,000 to 20,000 tons a year, about a thousandth of Pettersson's figure.¹  Morris's own arithmetic with that input gives about 2 inches, not 182 feet.²⁵  Apollo found "up to a few inches of loose dust" over a regolith "usually several metres thick," in which the meteoritic material is about 1.5 percent.¹

The withdrawal.  Snelling and Rush, in Answers in Genesis's own technical journal, April 1993:  "Unfortunately, attempted counter-responses by creationists have so far failed because of spurious arguments or faulty calculations.  Thus, until new evidence is forthcoming, creationists should not continue to use the dust on the moon as evidence against an old age for the moon and the solar system."¹  Their acknowledgement adds that the conclusions "unfortunately are not as encouraging or complimentary for us young earth creationists as we would have liked."¹  The argument is on the 2001 list as "definitely not" and has never left it.¹¹  In July 2014 CMI attached a note that new NASA data "seems to raise the possibility of at least a partial revival," and that any reassessment "would need to be similarly thorough and careful."²⁶

Still used.  Effectively no.  A September 2026 census of 329 young-earth websites found no affirmative use.¹⁸  The nearest is Jay Wile's 2024 repost, filed under "Young Age Evidence," which recomputes the old inference from a newer measurement and then answers its own question:  "So should creationists start using the moon dust argument again?  Certainly not!"²⁷

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  19 years from Scientific Creationism, 24 from the first Moon landing.  A tenfold higher influx would still leave Morris's number a hundredfold too large.

2. The shrinking Sun

At its peak.  In 1979 John Eddy and Aram Boornazian reported, in a conference abstract, that the Sun's diameter had shrunk by about 0.1 percent a century since 1863.  Creationists, in Danny Faulkner's account, "quickly took note of this report, and used it to argue that the sun may be powered by Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction rather than nuclear fusion," and "many creationists viewed the shrinking sun as a sort of silver bullet that would falsify the evolutionary timescale."²⁸  Faulkner's list of users runs from Hinderliter and Ackridge in 1980 to Henry Morris in 1985 and Rybka in 1993.

What undid it.  More data.  "Soon several papers were published refuting the shrinking sun with additional historical data," and Eddy and Boornazian never returned to their abstract.²⁸  The abstract itself reported rates that differed threefold between the horizontal and vertical diameters, which no shrinking sphere can do;  the detail is in Astronomy Arguments to Retire.

The withdrawal.  Donald DeYoung and David Rush, Creation Research Society Quarterly, 1989.  They concluded, in Faulkner's summary, "that the evidence was ambiguous enough that one could not be certain whether the sun is powered by gravitational contraction, nuclear fusion, or a combination of both, and hence the sun is not a good age indicator on this front."²⁸  It is on no list.

Still used.  No live use was found in 2026.¹⁸

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly, and too politely:  "ambiguous" understates a claim that its own source abstract undercut.  Lag:  about 9 years.

3. Missing solar neutrinos

At its peak.  Detectors from the late 1960s caught about a third of the neutrinos that fusion in the Sun's core should produce.  Some creationists proposed, as CMI's list summarises it, "that the sun was powered one-third by fusion and two-thirds by gravitational collapse.  This would have limited the age to far less than 4.5 billion years."¹¹  Andrew Snelling's 1997 paper "Solar Neutrinos:  The Critical Shortfall Still Elusive" was the last full statement.²⁹

What undid it.  The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, 2001 and 2002, detected the "missing" neutrinos as other flavours.  The total matched the fusion prediction.

The withdrawal.  Fast.  Robert Newton wrote it up in Journal of Creation in 2002, and by 2005 the list carried it among arguments that should definitely not be used:  "creationists should no longer invoke the missing neutrino problem to deny that fusion is the primary source of energy for the sun.  So it cannot be used as a young-age indicator—nor an old-age indicator for that matter."²²  Answers in Genesis put the correction inside the abstract of Snelling's 1997 paper:  "creationists should no longer use this as an 'age' argument."²⁹

Still used.  No live use was found in 2026.¹⁸

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly, and the cleanest case in the register:  a decisive measurement, a retraction within a year or two, and the correction attached to the original paper where a reader will find it.

4. Missing supernova remnants

At its peak.  Keith Davies argued at the 1994 International Conference on Creationism that the galaxy shows too few old supernova remnants.  Russell Humphreys's widely reprinted "Evidence for a Young World" (2005) made it item 2 of 14:  "the nearby parts of our galaxy in which we could observe such gas and dust shells contain only about 200 supernova remnants.  That number is consistent with only about 7,000 years worth of supernovas."³⁰

What undid it.  Remnants older than the argument allows.  Faulkner listed seventeen older than its cutoff.  He also checked Davies's supporting quotations and found the 1983 National Research Council question Davies relied on, "Where have all the remnants gone?", was about the opposite problem:  "note that the concern was not for missing old SNR, but with missing young SNRs."⁷

The withdrawal.  Danny Faulkner, Answers Research Journal, 2017:  "reexamination of the data shows that there indeed are old supernova remnants, and that stage three supernova remnants have been identified.  Therefore, this may not be a good argument for recent origin, and I discourage recent creationists from using it."⁷  It is on no list.

Still used.  Yes, and by the organisation that published the withdrawal.  Answers in Genesis still serves Humphreys's 2005 article with the argument at item 2, uncorrected, in five translations;  the Institute for Creation Research serves the same text;  CMI's own supernova page, last updated in 2011, never mentions Faulkner.  David Coppedge used the argument in September 2023 and Charles Jackson in June 2022.¹⁸³⁰

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly, by one astronomer, in one journal, and not yet by any institution.  Lag:  23 years from Davies.  Nine years after the withdrawal, this is the largest gap in the register between what the movement's scientists say and what its websites serve.

5. Faulkner's audit: thirty-two at once

The largest single act of withdrawal in the movement's history is not on any list.  In two 2019 papers in Answers Research Journal Danny Faulkner graded 48 astronomical young-age arguments, retired 32, kept 14 and left 2 undecided.³¹  He wrote:  "I discourage the use of those young-age indicators that do not survive scrutiny."²⁸  The retirements include red Sirius, technetium stars, the Algol paradox, star-cluster break-up and lunar dust.  None of the 32 has reached Answers in Genesis's own "Arguments to Avoid" page.³²  Astronomy Arguments to Retire goes through them and disagrees with Faulkner on two he kept.  This register counts the audit once, as a batch, and does not count its 32 items in the totals.

Part 3: The register, water and light

6. The vapour canopy

At its peak.  John Whitcomb and Henry Morris read the "waters above the firmament" of Genesis 1:6-7 as a canopy of water vapour over the pre-Flood earth in 1961.  Morris's Scientific Creationism (1974) gave it its full explanatory load:  "The favorable climate, aided by the highly effective radiation filter provided by the vapor canopy, would favor abundant plant and animal life, longevity of animal life, and growth of large-sized animal organisms."²⁴  Joseph Dillow's The Waters Above (1981) built the model with 12.19 metres of precipitable water.³³  It supplied Flood water, long lifespans, a mild climate and a rainless world at once.

What undid it.  The canopy's own modellers.  David Rush and Larry Vardiman ran a standard radiation code at the Institute for Creation Research and reported in 1990 that "only 50 mb of water vapor added above the present atmosphere would raise the surface temperature as determined by a radiation balance from 320 K to 409 K," which is half a metre of water, one twenty-fourth of Dillow's canopy.³⁴  In 1998 Vardiman and Karen Bousselot tuned every parameter in the canopy's favour and got "as much as 1.0 meter," and added:  "Unfortunately, this amount of water in a canopy would not contribute significantly to the waters of the Genesis Flood or produce significant pressure and density effects."³⁵  The constraint they would not relax was biblical:  "The chief reason why we cannot allow thick clouds is a Biblical one:  heavenly objects need to be visible."³⁴

The withdrawal.  In three steps over 25 years.  The 2001 list filed it as doubtful:  "no suitable model has been developed that holds sufficient water;  but some creationists suggest a partial canopy may have been present."¹⁰  Between April and October 2016 CMI moved it to "definitely not" and replaced the partial-canopy clause:  "So all creationist geologists prefer a different model."¹⁵  In March 2026 Answers in Genesis published Roger Patterson's verdict:  "The canopy is not clearly described in the text, and it provides more scientific problems than it solves.  As scientists and theologians, we would do more for the biblical creationist movement to ring the death bell of the canopy and move on to other endeavors."³⁶  Vardiman himself never recanted in print;  he published the numbers and proposed putting the water in orbit instead.

Still used.  Yes, at the edges.  Patterson notes that The MacArthur Study Bible, "one of the most widely distributed study Bibles available in multiple translations and languages," carries the canopy in its notes at Genesis 1:7, 7:4, 7:11 and 2 Peter 3:5.³⁶  The Genesis Park museum site still presents it at length, and the claims it once justified, such as pre-Flood longevity from screened radiation and giant animals in a denser atmosphere, still travel without it.¹⁸

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  40 years from The Genesis Flood to the first "doubtful" listing, 55 to "definitely not," 65 to Answers in Genesis's "death bell."  This is the slowest institutional withdrawal in the register, though the scientific one was fast:  the modellers published the numbers that killed it within nine years of Dillow's book.  Astronomy Arguments to Retire gives the physics in full.

7. Decaying speed of light

At its peak.  Barry Setterfield argued from 1981, and with Trevor Norman in a 1987 report prepared for Lambert Dolphin of SRI International, that the speed of light has fallen since creation:  "A systematic, non-linear decay trend is revealed by 163 measurements of c in dynamical time by 16 methods over 300 years."³⁷  If light was once millions of times faster, the distant-starlight problem disappears by physics, not by miracle.

What undid it.  A creationist physicist's refit within a year.  The report had given every measurement equal weight, though their stated uncertainties run from ± 20,000 km/s to ± 0.0003 km/s.  Gerald Aardsma, head of the Institute for Creation Research's astro-geophysics department, weighted the 163 points by their precision and got "decay of c = 0.0000140 ± 0.0000596 km/s/year," which is zero within the error.⁴  Russell Humphreys, who wanted the result to be true, wrote that "the underlying facts just do not support the hypothesis."³⁸  In 1992 Eugene Chaffin redid Rømer's seventeenth-century eclipse timings and found that the report's 2.6 percent anchor "was not real."³⁹  Decaying Speed of Light prices every step.

The withdrawal.  Aardsma, Creation Research Society Quarterly, June 1988:  "In the absence of positive, historical, experimental evidence for the decay of c, and in the face of the unacceptable implications of the theory, the hypothesis must be rejected."⁴  Andrew Repp's 2022 survey in the same journal records the outcome:  "a general consensus has emerged (see e.g., Chaffin, 1992) that the purported evidence for such decay is artifactual in nature."⁴⁰  The don't-use list has filed it as "doubtful" since at least 2001, with a reason that has not changed:  "Although most of the evolutionary counter-arguments have been proven to be fallacious, there are still a number of problems, many of which were raised by creationists, which we believe have not been satisfactorily answered."¹¹

Still used.  Yes, by its author.  Setterfield's own site carries his "Modifications to Light-Speed Model," dated 2001 and updated February 2012, which moves the mechanism to a rising zero-point energy and reports that "evidence is accumulating that a slight rise in c has occurred."⁴¹

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly, and filed too gently.  "Doubtful" undersells a hypothesis that the movement's own physicists rejected on its own data in 1988, and the list's remark that "most of the evolutionary counter-arguments have been proven to be fallacious" is beside the point, because the decisive counter-arguments were creationist ones and were never answered.  Lag:  7 years from Setterfield's first articles, 1 year from the 1987 report.

Part 4: The register, rocks and fossils

8. The Paluxy "man tracks"

At its peak.  The claim reached The Genesis Flood in 1961, the film Footprints in Stone in 1973 and John Morris's book Tracking Those Incredible Dinosaurs in 1980.  The Institute for Creation Research's 1976 Impact opened:  "One of the most shattering pieces of evidence comes from the Paluxy River basin in central Texas, near the town of Glen Rose, where fossilized tracks of man and dinosaur appear together."⁴²

What undid it.  Carvings sold in the 1930s, elongated dinosaur tracks whose side toes had been filled by mud, and from 1982 the toes coming back as coloured infill.  A creationist team from Loma Linda said so in 1975:  "it is obvious that the tracks cannot be both man and dinosaur."²  Glen Kuban, who had been raised a creationist, mapped the trails from 1980.  Human and Dinosaur Tracks Together gives the evidence.

The withdrawal.  Films for Christ took the film out of circulation in December 1985.⁸  ICR's Impact of 1 January 1986, written by the author of the 1980 book, ended:  "Even though it would now be improper for creationists to continue to use the Paluxy data as evidence against evolution, in the light of these questions, there is still much that is not known about the tracks and continued research is in order.  We stand committed to truth, and will gladly modify or abandon our previous interpretation of the Paluxy data as the facts dictate."³  The same page hinted, without evidence, that the colouring could have been applied with "readily available chemical agents";³  ICR's own 2013 retrospective reported that "we could find no evidence that any foreign chemical had been added,"⁴³ and put Morris's change of mind earlier:  "in 1984 I concluded we had most likely made an error."⁴³  The list carried Paluxy as "definitely not" from 2001 until 2024, and as "doubtful" since.¹⁰¹⁷

Still used.  Yes, outside the large organisations.  The bible.ca site, whose track pages carry Don Patton's material, still promotes the Delk slab of 2008, a loose rock with a "human" print under a dinosaur print that by its promoters' account "sat in his living room for years" before the human print was noticed.⁴⁴  CMI's geologist Tas Walker answered it in 2019:  "This means that the artefact has no real apologetic value."⁴⁵

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  14 years from The Genesis Flood to Neufeld's paper, and 25 to ICR's withdrawal, which came ten years after ICR's own pamphlet.  ICR's 1986 withdrawal is real but hedged, and the hedge sat beside an insinuation of tampering that took ICR 27 years to close.

9. Precambrian pollen in the Grand Canyon

At its peak.  Clifford Burdick reported in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in 1966 that pollen of conifers and flowering plants occurs in four Grand Canyon shales down to the Precambrian Hakatai Shale.  His summary:  "Finding of spores of plants at least closely related to pines in the Pre-Cambrian makes it extremely difficult to visualize any evolutionary development of these specialized plants.  The undoubted occurance of pollen of flowering plants is even more difficult to explain in usually accepted evolutionary concepts."⁴⁶  He drew the wider moral on the page before:  "I am inclined to consider retention of the idea of time significance more a matter of faith than science."⁴⁶

What undid it.  Arthur Chadwick, a creationist biologist at Loma Linda, went to the canyon with Burdick in 1971, relocated his sample localities, re-sampled them on three further trips, and ran fifty samples under contamination controls:  "No single example of an authentic pollen grain was obtained from any of these samples."⁵  Burdick's eighteen identifiable grains matched, taxon by taxon, the modern pollen falling on the canyon rim.⁵  The Order of the Fossil Record and Claimed Fossil Anomalies give the detail.

The withdrawal.  By one scientist, not by any organisation.  Chadwick, in the Geoscience Research Institute's journal Origins in 1981:  "The simplest hypothesis to explain Burdick's data is that the pollen grains he reported in 1966 and in 1972 were modern contamination picked up either during collection and transportation or infiltrated into the sample itself prior to collection."⁵  The claim is on no don't-use list, and no statement on it from Answers in Genesis or ICR was found.

Still used.  Yes, by the society that published it.  The Creation Research Society's website hosts Carl Froede's "Precambrian Plant Fossils and the Hakatai Shale Controversy," which argues against rejecting the plant fossils.⁴⁷

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly by Chadwick, and never withdrawn by the movement.  Lag:  15 years to Chadwick;  sixty years and counting for the Creation Research Society.  Of the twelve entries this is the clearest case of a correction that exists in print and has no institutional owner.

10. "No sign of thrusting" at the Lewis Overthrust

At its peak.  Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, on the Lewis Overthrust of Montana and Alberta, where Precambrian rock lies on Cretaceous:  "In the light of such physical evidence as cited above, how is it possible to defend any longer the grand fiction of the "Lewis overthrust"?"²³  Clifford Burdick defended the same reading in the Creation Research Society Quarterly in 1969 and 1974.

What undid it.  The contact itself, then drilling and seismic surveys.  Geological Claims to Retire gives the detail.

The withdrawal.  Kurt Wise, a young-earth palaeontologist, at the first International Conference on Creationism in 1986:  "A close examination of the contact between the Cretaceous and Precambrian rocks leaves no doubt that the contact is a fault contact."⁴⁸  Timothy Clarey, at the seventh conference in 2013:  "Authors who are critical of the geologic column should no longer use the denial of overthrusts as part of their argument."⁶  It is on no list.

Still used.  Only in hedged or archival form;  ICR's current geology accepts the thrust.¹⁸

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  25 years to Wise, 52 to Clarey.  The 27 years between them are the gap between one scientist's correction and the field's acceptance of it.

11. Artefacts in coal, and human bones in old rock

At its peak.  A gold chain, an iron pot, a bell and other objects said to have fallen out of lumps of coal, and the Castenedolo and Calaveras human remains in Tertiary deposits, were offered from The Genesis Flood onward as relics of the pre-Flood world.

What undid it.  In every coal case the coal is gone, and the Castenedolo and Calaveras bones date to the last thousand years by radiocarbon.  Geological Claims to Retire has the detail.

The withdrawal.  On the list since at least 2001.  On the coal:  "Several artefacts, including gold objects, have been documented as having been found within coal, but in each case the coal is no longer associated with the artefact.  The evidence is therefore strictly anecdotal."¹¹  On the bones:  "the Castenedolo skeletal material shows evidence of being an intrusive burial, i.e. a recent burial into older strata … The Calaveras skull was probably a hoax planted into a mine by miners."¹¹

Still used.  Yes.  An October 2026 census found the hammer and coal finds on creation-museum pages, a Calaveras defence revised in June 2026, and ICR still serving a 2013 report on coal artefacts and a 1981 article citing "Castenedolo Man."¹⁸

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  up to 40 years to the list, which is the first dated withdrawal found.

12. Living plesiosaurs and dinosaurs

At its peak.  In April 1977 the Japanese trawler Zuiyo-maru netted a rotting carcass off New Zealand that looked like a plesiosaur.  Creationists cited it for two decades as a living relic of the Flood world, and wider claims of living dinosaurs in the Congo and pterosaurs in New Guinea ran alongside it.  Living Dinosaur Claims gives the history.

What undid it.  The Japanese researchers' own tissue analysis.  Pierre Jerlström reviewed it in CMI's technical journal in 1998:  "The majority of the findings clearly indicated that the carcass was a decaying basking shark."⁴⁹

The withdrawal.  The Zuiyo-maru was on the 2001 list.¹⁰  In February 2018 CMI went further and added living dinosaurs and plesiosaurs as a class:  "CMI now believes that enough years have passed, and photographs can now be taken with a smartphone, that dinosaurs have died out, and contrary claims require proof, not excuses."¹¹

Still used.  Yes, by Answers in Genesis, which drops the Zuiyo-maru but still writes of marine reptiles that "some may still be living today in deep lakes or the deep sea."⁵⁰

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly.  Lag:  21 years from the carcass to Jerlström, 41 to CMI's general withdrawal.  The two largest ministries now disagree.

13. The Ta Prohm "stegosaurus"

At its peak.  Answers in Genesis, 2007, on a twelfth-century carving at the Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia:  "That means that only a little over 800 years ago, some dinosaurs were likely still living in the region of Cambodia!"⁵¹

What undid it.  The "plates" match the foliage carved around the other animals in the same series, and the head, snout and legs do not fit a stegosaur.  Dinosaurs in Ancient Art and Text gives the detail.

The withdrawal.  Keaton Halley, CMI's Journal of Creation, July 2025:  "Therefore, it is recommended that creationists avoid using this example as evidence for dinosaurs living in recent centuries."⁵²  It is not yet on CMI's list.

Still used.  Yes, and contested.  Answers in Genesis's 2025 evidence register files the carving under evidences that "Still Need More Confirmation/Verification," not among those to avoid, and says it "strongly resembles a stegosauroid dinosaur, if the plates on the back are actually on the animal and not a decorative flourish."⁵⁰  David Woetzel disputed Halley in 2026.

Verdict.  Withdrawn rightly by CMI, and the newest entry.  Lag:  at least 19 years, from Don Patton's 2006 article on bible.ca, which says the carvers "saw a stegosaurus as they saw monkeys, buffalo and deer."⁵³

Part 5: The count

Entry 5, Faulkner's batch of 32 astronomy retirements, is left out of the table and the counts.  Lags run from first print to first withdrawal by a creationist, not to the list.⁹

How many.  Twelve arguments that creationist writers printed as science were later withdrawn by creationists.  Faulkner's 2019 audit adds 32 more in astronomy alone.

By whom.  Ten of the twelve first withdrawals were written by named creationist scientists in creationist journals or proceedings:  Snelling and Rush, DeYoung and Rush, Newton, Faulkner, Aardsma, Neufeld, Chadwick, Wise, Jerlström and Halley.  The other two, the canopy and the coal finds, were first withdrawn by the don't-use list itself.  None was first withdrawn by an organisation's statement of policy, and none by an outside critic, though outside critics had reached most of these answers first.

How long.  The twelve lags have a median of 19 years.  The quick ones, solar neutrinos and light speed, were settled by one decisive check that anyone could run.  The slow ones, the canopy and the coal finds, had no single decisive check:  the canopy was a model that could always be thinned, and a lost artefact cannot be re-examined.

How far the withdrawals travelled.  Seven of the twelve reached the don't-use list.  Its earliest surviving copy is from December 2001, so the list's lag behind its scientists can only be bounded:  up to 8 years on moon dust, 13 on light speed, and on the Paluxy tracks 15 from ICR's withdrawal or 26 from Neufeld's.  Five never reached it, including the supernova remnants, which Faulkner withdrew in Answers in Genesis's own journal.

How many still circulate.  Eight of twelve.  Four have effectively stopped:  moon dust, the shrinking Sun, solar neutrinos and the Lewis Overthrust denial.  The pattern in the eight is consistent.  Where an argument survives, it survives on a page nobody has revisited (Humphreys 2005 on supernova remnants), with an independent promoter the organisations do not control (Patton, Setterfield, the museums), or in print that cannot be recalled (a study Bible, a DVD).

Objections and responses

1. "A movement that had to withdraw this many arguments has no science worth reading." Every active field withdraws claims. The test is whether the withdrawals came from inside, on evidence, and in print. Here they did, ten times out of twelve by name. The fairer criticism is the lag, and the gap between the journals and the websites, which this article measures rather than excuses.
2. "These were fringe arguments, not the movement's science." Not so. Moon dust and the canopy were in Scientific Creationism; the Paluxy tracks and the Lewis Overthrust were in The Genesis Flood; the supernova-remnant argument is item 2 of a list that Answers in Genesis and ICR still serve. These were front-line arguments. The straw-man entries on CMI's list are a different category, and this register excludes them.
3. "Withdrawing an argument is just retreating to an unfalsifiable position." Sometimes. Answers in Genesis's 2025 register says its belief that humans and dinosaurs coexisted rests "not because of the above or other evidences, but because Scripture says so."⁵⁰ That is candid, and it means that losing the Paluxy tracks or Ta Prohm costs the belief nothing. But in most entries here the withdrawal gave up a claim about the physical world, such as a thin layer of dust on an old Moon, a Sun powered by contraction, or a once-faster light, and those were testable claims that failed their tests.
4. "The moon-dust argument has been revived by new data, so its withdrawal was premature." CMI's 2014 note raised the possibility, and Jay Wile recomputed it in 2024. Wile's own answer was "Certainly not!"²⁷ A tenfold higher influx still leaves Morris's 182 feet about a hundred times too large.²⁵
5. "The c-decay entry is only 'doubtful,' so it is still open." It is filed as doubtful, and the list's own reason concedes that the unanswered problems were raised by creationists. The Creation Research Society's own 2022 survey records "a general consensus" that the evidence for decay "is artifactual in nature."⁴⁰ "Doubtful" is a filing decision, not a finding.
6. "Moving Paluxy to 'doubtful' in 2024 shows new evidence for the tracks." None appeared. The entry's text did not change, and it still says research "has not been promising."¹⁷ The move is unexplained, and that is the most that can be said.
7. "Critics never credit creationists for retracting." CMI makes this complaint in its preface, and it is fair.¹¹ This article credits each retraction by name. It also counts the arguments still in use, because a retraction that does not reach the people repeating the argument has not finished its work.

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Peak statements not read here. The 1977–78 creationist statements on the Zuiyo-maru, the early solar-neutrino and shrinking-Sun papers (Hinderliter 1980, Ackridge 1980, DeYoung and Rush 1989 itself), and Davies 1994 were not obtained; those entries rest on later creationist summaries of them, which are named.
2. The list's earlier history. The Answers in Genesis page may predate its first archived copy of December 2001. Its first appearance, and whether the canopy or Paluxy tiers changed before then, are not known.
3. Why Paluxy moved in 2024. A question to CMI would settle it.
4. Lag dates are first-print dates found here. An earlier creationist use of any argument would lengthen its lag. The median would change little unless several did.
5. The register is not exhaustive. Faulkner's 32 are handled as a batch, and arguments withdrawn quietly, by being dropped from later editions without comment, leave no withdrawal to quote. A comparison of the 1974 and 1985 editions of Scientific Creationism, and of ICR's Impact series against its later reprints, would find more.
6. Circulation counts come from two web censuses, of astronomy arguments on 1 September 2026 and of geological arguments on 15 October 2026, made for sibling articles. Sermons, DVDs and classroom material are not searchable and are surely larger.

Verdict

The record shows a movement that corrects itself in its journals and struggles to correct itself anywhere else.  Twelve arguments printed as science were withdrawn by creationists, ten of them by named scientists in creationist venues, and each withdrawal examined here was right on the evidence.  The median withdrawal took 19 years.  Seven reached the movement's one list, which has never removed an entry and has re-filed two without saying why.  Eight of the twelve are still in circulation.  A skeptic who says creationists never retract is wrong, and a creationist who says the movement has dealt with its bad arguments is also wrong:  its scientists have dealt with many of them, and its organisations, museums and publishers are still catching up.

Sources