A question for Ken Ham last week and a question about debates

[T_aquaticus (The Friendly Neighborhood Atheist)]

@jbabraham88

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Evidence for the flood as the source of fossil deposition vs radiometric dating of fossils
Argument and counterargument

A BioLogos article I reread recently has a great point:

One question that comes up frequently about evolutionary biology is whether it really boils down to speculation and assumption. Most of evolution happened in the distant past, after all. We claim that humans and chimpanzees descended from a single ancestral species over millions of years, for example, but none of us was there to observe that process. To a scientist, though, the right question is not, “Were you there?” but rather “What if?” What if we do share a common ancestor–what should we see? How can we test a hypothesis about the ancient past?
Testing Common Ancestry: It’s All About the Mutations - BioLogos

I think this gets to the heart of the matter. What would we expect to see if the Earth is as old as science claims? How would Ken Ham and others at AiG answer this question?

Let’s look at fossils and radiometric dating as an example. Let’s not even call it radiometric dating specifically. Rather, what are our expectations when it comes to the ratios of parent and daughter isotopes in rocks and how they are associated with fossils?

First, we have to address radioactive decay from parent to daughter isotopes. These decay rates are as much a property of matter as any other physical characteristic. AiG seems to assume that properties such as the viscosity and density of water were the same in the past, so why not radioactive decay which is tied into the same atomic properties involved in density and viscosity.

Given the constancy of radioactive decay, what would we expect to see? Well, we would expect a strong correlation between the ratios of parent and daughter isotopes in rocks with different fossil species. As life changed over a long Earth history species came and went, and their appearance and disappearance should correlate with time periods. This will necessarily align with ratios of isotopes in rocks as those parent isotopes decay over those long time periods.

What should we see if the fossil record was primarily the product of a recent global flood? We shouldn’t expect to see any correlation between fossils and the ratios of isotopes in the rocks associated with those fossils. Floods aren’t able to sort rocks based on tiny differences in parent and daughter isotopes, and they certainly aren’t able to do so while also sorting fossils in a way that correlates with those tiny differences in isotope ratios. Even more, we shouldn’t see much in the way of decay in those rocks to begin with since there hasn’t been enough time for substantial amounts of daughter isotopes to accumulate in those rocks.

On its face, there’s a huge difference in what we would expect to see in both scenarios. The YEC response is to come up with completely ad hoc mechanisms, such as accelerated decay. As discussed in another thread, if decay increased as they suggest then it would turn the Earth into a heated ball of plasma so bright it would have 25% of the brightness of the entire Milky Way. What is AiG’s response? God made the heat go away, somehow or some way. The only reason YEC’s invent these mechanisms and ad hoc rescues is because the evidence is so strongly in favor of an old Earth.

So it isn’t really argument/counter-argument. It’s two arguments, and only one makes any sense. When you have to invent stuff out of whole cloth in order to make contradictory evidence go away you don’t have much of an argument. The evidence is exactly what we would expect to see if the Earth is old, and I don’t see how AiG could argue otherwise.