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The creation/evolution thread got me wondering about what evidence for a young earth is being ignored by the geologists, evolutionists, etc. because it conflicts with the old earth theory.
I'm particularly interested in what any resident creationists find convincing, but if you're an old-earther and are scratching your head about something that doesn't seem to agree with that view, I'd like to hear that too.
Please pick on or two of the most compelling items, don't just copy a list from a creationist web site. I'd like to be able to look in-depth at a few issues rather than have copy/paste battles to see who can quote the longest list.
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posted
This Site is headed "What are the most compelling scientific evidences for a young earth"; however, all these scientific evidences are exegetical (I learnt a new word from the site). This means they are all looking at the Bible and interpreting it in some way.
I know you said you didn't want a list, but according to that site, there is no scientific evidence that is not drawn from the Bible.
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She just started wearing a training bra and thinks that lawyers should strive for truth, even if it doesn't benefit their clients.
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Teshi: Many creationists claim that there is evidence for a young earth that is not drawn from the Bible. I am aware of many of the claims, but I'm hoping that someone who actually advocates them will be interested in discussing what they believe is the most compelling.
quote:Originally posted by Javert Hugo: She just started wearing a training bra and thinks that lawyers should strive for truth, even if it doesn't benefit their clients.
posted
I've never heard any evidence for a young earth that didn't come from the Bible. I'd be very surprised if any exists, but I'm willing to be open-minded if someone has something.
But just out of curiosity, why is it so important to believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old?
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quote:Originally posted by Javert Hugo: She just started wearing a training bra and thinks that lawyers should strive for truth, even if it doesn't benefit their clients.
posted
Look at Kat's post as a direct reply to the thread title and not anything contained within the thread. Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:I've never heard any evidence for a young earth that didn't come from the Bible.
One example is the claim that the geologic structure of the grand canyon indicates that it was carved during a catastrophic flood, rather than through millions of years of erosion. This claim, while obviously inspired by Bibilical beliefs, can be examined objectively without referring to the Bible.
quote:But just out of curiosity, why is it so important to believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old?
Because, for Biblical literalists, if anything in the Bible is determined to not be literally correct, then everything in the Bible can be questioned.
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I think that's sort of putting the horse before the cart. Since the young earth theory came first, the question ought to be what evidence there is for the old earth theory.
From what I can tell, the old earth theory is almost entirely based on the unproven premise that evolution happens gradually over very long periods of time and that changes to the earth also happen very slowly over lengthy periods.
Those are ideas that are comfortable, so it's no big surprise that they were adopted, but there isn't much basis for them.
Basically, the physical evidence doesn't say one way or another how fast biological and geological changes have occurred.
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Lisa: Nonsense. The evidence for an old earth comes from physics and geology, not evolution theory.
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quote:Basically, the physical evidence doesn't say one way or another how fast biological and geological changes have occurred.
Actually, the physical evidence indicates that certain processes take a certain period of time to occur. Those processes have been observed to operate at the same rate for all of recorded history.
The assumption then, is that those processes have always operated at those rates and attempts to induce the same processes to occur at faster or slower rates have failed.
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posted
I think the old earth theory predates the theory of evolution. It's largely based on radioisotope dating, and does not depend on biological evidence. In particular, the exact age of the earth is based more on metorites than earth rocks, since most of the rocks on the surface of the earth have been melted and reformed multiple times since the earth coalesced.
And yes, there are ways of getting around contamination of rocks with the daughter isotope -- in K-Ar dating for example, the argon isn't incorporated into the rock during formation because it's a gas and wouldn't stay inside the rock as it cools.
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posted
Um, even by the admission of some young-earthers, most of the support of young earth creationism is just to say that it is true, because the Bible says so. It makes sense when you think about it -- the Bible is held to be the incontrivertable standard, to which a naturalistic methodology is irrelevant as a criticism.
As a result, the 'products' and 'holdings' of science are held usually to be fatally flawed or corrupted and it leaves too little real data to work with. All they do, to a great extent, is to attempt to debunk widely held theories and methods to say that there is a contradiction that proves these methods to be irredemably false. Whenever they try a different tact through the production of independent proof of a young earth, it's usually beaten down rather hard because these proofs are usually deeply flawed as a result of preconclusive bias and/or a lack of scientific literacy involved in their creation.
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posted
Radioisotope dating makes tons of assumptions. What proportions of various isotopes were present at a starting point, for one thing. What can effect those proportions, for another. Do the proportions stay constant except for half-life decay? Can environmental factors have an effect? Sunspot activity? Volcanic activity?
And I'm a little skeptical about radioisotope dating pre-dating evolutionary theory. Do you have any evidence for that?
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quote:I think the old earth theory predates the theory of evolution.
This is true. In fact, the geologic evidence that the earth was very old was a necessary precursor to the theory of evolution as we know it. There had been some theories similar to Darwin's before, but they had been dismissed out of hand because the earth wasn't thought to be old enough.
quote:It's largely based on radioisotope dating, and does not depend on biological evidence.
Maybe it is now, but it wasn't based on radioisotope dating back then.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Those are ideas that are comfortable, so it's no big surprise that they were adopted, but there isn't much basis for them.
Comfortable? Even though they went against thousands of years of belief?
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I'm willing to accept that young-earthers hold their beliefs for strictly religious purposes. If they concede that point (perhaps implicitly by not providing scientific evidence for their claim), that's fine with me.
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: Those are ideas that are comfortable, so it's no big surprise that they were adopted, but there isn't much basis for them.
Comfortable? Even though they went against thousands of years of belief?
<nod> It's very comforting to think that as things are now, so will they be tomorrow. And that only follows from the belief that as things were yesterday, so are they today.
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posted
If you're interested, Lisa, there are numerous papers that have tackled the various potential problems with isotope dating and explain why it remains useful.
There's also the the particular strangeness that if there are such significant problems with radio isotope dating as to turn millions of years into hundreds or thousands of years, that distortion has worked identically with all of the overlapping radio isotope dating range, corresponds to the ages we'd expect based on geological strata models, et cetera. In other words, for radio isotope dating to be that wrong would require a confluence of probability beyond my imagination.
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The King Clone creosote bush in the Mojave Desert, being almost double the assumed YEC assumption of the world's age, would probably also be suitably stumped by such a confluence of probability.
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quote:I think the old earth theory predates the theory of evolution. It's largely based on radioisotope dating, and does not depend on biological evidence. In particular, the exact age of the earth is based more on metorites than earth rocks, since most of the rocks on the surface of the earth have been melted and reformed multiple times since the earth coalesced.
Before there was radioisotope dating and evolution, there were plenty of theories that the earth was older than specified in the Bible and other such places.
Before Darwin ever thought of evolution, geologists were divided over Catastophism and Uniformatism (led by Hutton and then later Lyell). Catastrophism, although not strictly Biblical, held that the world as we see it today had been created by series of 'catastrophies' and other major events (floods, huge sudden uphevels in the rock etc.). Uniformatarianism said that no such things had occured (although now it is accepted that at least some catastrophes happen, such as asteroid bombardement or huge bits falling off cliffs and mountains and thus allowing seas to suddenly drain, or ice ages, although it should be noted that many of these do actually fit in with the principal of uniformitarianism etc.) and that the world was shaped by the same processes we see at work today.
Uniformitarianism, for example, meant that mountains didn't spring up overnight. If they had been formed at the speed they were moving at the moment, clearly longer than a few thousand years would be required. Other rock formations told a similar story. As a result, the Earth was believed to be older than a few thousand years before Darwin packed his bags (taking with him Lyell's Principles of Geology) and got onto the Beagle.
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quote:And yes, there are ways of getting around contamination of rocks with the daughter isotope -- in K-Ar dating for example, the argon isn't incorporated into the rock during formation because it's a gas and wouldn't stay inside the rock as it cools.
There are a number of other ways to deal with this, such as isochron dating.
As far as I know, there's some minor variability in decay rates, but nothing that could change 4.5 billion years into thousands or even millions.
MPH, you're right. It wasn't radioisotope dating, but as nearly as I can tell, geologists had already rejected the idea of the earth being a couple thousand years old.
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posted
I think most creationists use the flood as a reasoning that the earth is as young as it is. The argument is that it acted kind of like a giant catalyst for a lot of things... The trans-continental rift and seperation of the continents, climate change, ice age... Actually, if one is a creationist, he or she could argue that Global warming isn't anybody's fault, because it's really just iso-static rebound.
Conviently though, God promised not to send another one, so nobody can observe it properly to see what impact it would really have, or even how it happened. We can only theorize.
*** Edited for clarity ***
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quote:Originally posted by Nathan2006: I think most creationists use the flood as a reasoning that the earth is as young as it is. The argument is that it acted kind of like a giant catalyst for a lot of things... The trans-continental rift and seperation of the continents, climate change, ice age... Actually, if one is a creationist, he or she could argue that Global warming isn't anybody's fault, because it's really just iso-static rebound.
Conviently though, God promised not to send another one, so nobody can observe it properly to see what impact it would really have, or even how it happened. We can only theorize.
*** Edited for clarity ***
He also conveniently got rid of all the extra water it would take to flood the entire planet.
quote:Originally posted by mr_porteiro_head: If he did do that, I'd say it's pretty darn convenient for all of us.
I don't know. If Kevin Costner can survive on a planet covered in water, I think the rest of us have pretty good odds of survival. Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Lisa: I think that's sort of putting the horse before the cart. Since the young earth theory came first, the question ought to be what evidence there is for the old earth theory.
From what I can tell, the old earth theory is almost entirely based on the unproven premise that evolution happens gradually over very long periods of time and that changes to the earth also happen very slowly over lengthy periods.
Then you need to do more research. Old earth theories were first proposed in the early 1800s, 50 years before Darwin, by geologists who had set out to find evidence for the Flood. Being honest scientists, they reported that they could not find any such evidence, but concluded that the Earth must be at least a few hundred thousand years old.
I further suggest that you consider the concept of varves. These are annual deposits of layers on lake bottoms. Now, there's no theory saying "This happens once a year", we can actually see it happen! It's like tree rings but the record lasts longer; and that record agrees with carbon dating out to twenty thousand years, which is as far back as we can find varves. Is this evidence, or not?
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posted
Why do you assume evidence will matter to someone who believes in their heart that their faith is true?
An interesting statement I've read lately, and I don't know how true it is: Debating beliefs as if they're scientific theories to be tested is useless, since people don't actually think of them that way.
It's a difference in worldview.
This, by the way, is not necessarily related to Lisa, so don't think it is, but it's something more in general.
No evidence will change the views of some people (again, going in general, not necessarily Lisa) because they simply do not care.
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quote:Originally posted by MattP: I'm willing to accept that young-earthers hold their beliefs for strictly religious purposes. If they concede that point (perhaps implicitly by not providing scientific evidence for their claim), that's fine with me.
I hold my young-earth beliefs for strictly religious purposes and do not think it necessary that the young age of the earth be provable from secular assumptions, as I have stated here in the past.
quote:Originally posted by Christine: But just out of curiosity, why is it so important to believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old?
I don't believe that in itself is that important, but I do believe it's important to understand God's interactions with creation and particularly humans in the light that scripture presents it, in that God did not intend for death or resource scarcity to be the norm for creation, which is a requirement for any Old Earth scenarios. I believe those to have been introduced as a consequence of the actions of the first humans.
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...which your god, being omnipotent, knew about in advance and could easily have prevented. Not intended, pfeh.
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Yet that's not what the fossil evidence, the geological evidence, the astrological evidence, the DNA evidence, the historical and prehistoric human evidence (some of which predates the given date for creation in the Bible) etc, indicates.
If they did happen as you stated, it would be evident in creation. It would be quite obvious if your statement is the case. There's no reason, if your statement is correct, for the evidence to all be pointing towards a universe of scarce resources and death as the norm.
But it is. It simply is.
Why not come to the obvious conclusion? (and not that it was changed by God's actions. Why, if that is the case, would you trust a God who would create such a fraud? How could you trust a proven liar with the power to lie perfectly?)
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To expand upon it: Why would God allow anything like that to happen, if it wasn't the intention?
Omnipotence, anyone? Omnipotence. The power to do anything. (at least, anything logically possible.)
Think about that for a moment. You claim God is omnipotent. Omnipotent! All powerful! Able to do anything! He's the irresistable force! (if an irresistable force exists, then logically, there can't be an immovable object. That's what irresistable means, after all.)
And yet, God somehow allowed his plans to go awry.
How is that?
We go, then, to the key problem: God can, logically, only be two of these three things: omnipotent, omniscient, and good. This world, and its current state, makes it clear that God isn't working in it to save people, or to make justice occur.
Either he's all powerful, not all seeing and good (like an absent-minded father), he's not all powerful, but all seeing, and good (basically, doesn't have the power to make good happen), he's neither all powerful nor all seeing, but good (so, he can't see all injustice, and can't stop it) or he's all powerful, all seeing and evil (at least by human perspectives. If we saw a man watch someone die, who they could have saved, and willingly stand back and not allow it, would that not be evil? By that standard, God is no better.) The other possibilities exist too, that God is evil but not all powerful, but we don't need to get into that.
Because it's not so obvious to people for whom young earth creationism is Truth with a capital "T". I an understand and respect that someone acknowledges a religious belief that the earth is only 10,000 years old and that any evidence to the contrary represents our own misunderstanding of the nature of the universe.
What chaps my hide are the people that claim that the preponderance of scientific evidence supports a young-earth view. I do believe that people who hold that view are, generally speaking, ignorant of science, dishonest, or both.
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quote:What chaps my hide are the people that claim that the preponderance of scientific evidence supports a young-earth view.
Who are these people?
And if you think so very little of them, why did you start a thread specifically soliciting these mythical people's opinions? It hardly seems like an act of good faith.
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The entire staff of AiG, Duane Gish, Ron Lambert, Jay, etc.
quote:And if you think so very little of them, why did you start a thread specifically soliciting these mythical people's opinions? It hardly seems like an act of good faith.
I didn't say I thought little of all of them, I said they were either ignorant or dishonest. Clearly I think little of the dishonest ones, who have been shown why their science is flawed but refuse to acknowledge criticisms.
However, ignorant is not a negative characterization. I'm exceedingly ignorant myself on most subjects.
I was hoping to get some responses from those who honestly believe the science supports the young earth view so I could have a polite dialog on the subject and see where we end up, not on the question of young earth vs. old earth, but on a few of the scientific arguments for a young earth.
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There is no way I would want to have a conversation with someone who considered me either ignorant or dishonest or both off the bat.
Were you looking for a real dialog or just looking for a nice and vulnerable target? Considering your pre-formed, vehement opinion of them, it seems very much like the second.
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Are you looking for a real dialog here kat? Because you appear to be a bit of a pot calling the kettle black.
edit: If you were aking your "Who are these people?" question respectfully, I very much doubt that you'd immediately, without waiting for a response, follow it up with an answer with "mythical people".
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quote:There is no way I would want to have a conversation with someone who considered me either ignorant or dishonest or both off the bat.
Again, I think you are putting too much negative value on "ignorant." When two people disagree on any subject, such that their conclusions are mutually exclusive, one or both of them is ignorant by definition.
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quote:When two people disagree on any subject, such that their conclusions are mutually exclusive, one or both of them is definitionally ignorant.
I don't think that is true. When people disagree about facts, that could be said to generally be true (assuming that one person knows things that the other doesn't), but many disagreements center more around interpretations of facts.
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quote:but many disagreements center more around interpretations of facts.
And if those interpretations (conclusions) are mutually exclusive? If I examine a piece of evidence and conclude 4B+ age and you conclude, from the same evidence, 6-10K age, is not at least one of us ignorant as to the true age of the earth?
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Then people have a different intrepretation. I don't see where ignorance enters in there. It's not a question of someone not knowing something, as far as I can see.
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It's a common fallacy to assume that if someone agrees with you, it means they don't understand or are not in possession of all the facts.
However, disagreements arise from more than this.
In this given instance, I'm still not sure what goal is for a dialog. You don't seem real willing to listen, and I've learned more from other posters are the specific scientific rationale for a very large number of years for the age of the earth.
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