Funny you should ask;
## Geological evidence for a young age of the earth
Ah, the good old “101 evidences for a young earth and universe” article. Better titled “101 ways to completely disregard the basic rules and principles of how to measure things.”
A whole string of these arguments merely point out that the earth contains young things, or that some geological processes can happen rapidly given the right conditions. Neither of these are sufficient to demonstrate that the earth is young. The earth is older than the oldest thing it contains, not the same age as some conveniently cherry-picked data point or other. Additionally, in order to establish a young earth, you need to show that all geological processes could have happened quickly without vaporising the earth in the process. Furthermore, when different data sets line up with each other, it is necessary to demonstrate that they could have happened in lock-step with each other.
This list falls far, far short of achieving this.
Edit: I also note that the article says this:
No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe, and that includes the ones we have listed here. Although age indicators are called ‘clocks’ they aren’t, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve making assumptions about the past. Always the starting time of the ‘clock’ has to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed.
There is no independent natural clock against which those assumptions can be tested.
This is a flat-out lie. There are several natural clocks whose assumptions are independent of each other. Radiometric dating, tree rings, lake varves, ice cores, continental drift, just to name but a few.
3 Likes
Oh boy what a read that was, yea I use to link to stuff like this also when I was YEC but i’m sorry but science trumps this the YEC strawman as with the whole “two different worldviews” idea.
No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe
So the point that YECers refuse to even try and prove the earth is 6,000 years old and just throw up their arms says say “There is really no way when we can date the earth or anything” but when science goes their way they use it. Pure selective research and ignorance. We have methods that can accurately date the earth and stuff of it.
**
Ages of millions of years are all calculated by assuming the rates of change of processes in the past were the same as we observe today—called the principle of uniformitarianism. If the age calculated from such assumptions disagrees with what they think the age should be, they conclude that their assumptions did not apply in this case, and adjust them accordingly. If the calculated result gives an acceptable age, the investigators publish it.
**
But yet the evidenc shows doesn’t assume as YEC pesdou-science does. But science shows us that we can observe a rock from the Cambrian era and it shows it millions of years also. Again may I ask you to read Genesis 1 and 2 and see we have two different accounts of creation. Genesis One starts off as the standard creation account (which is at times no different from other Ancient Near Eastern creation accounts) and Genesis Two starts off with a barren dry dead land and God then had a mist fall on the earth and then rivers and sea formed. Then Yahweh forms Adam (notice in Genesis 1 it’s adam which is lowercase which means humanity as in all humans but in Genesis 2 it’s Adam the person) Then Yahweh forms all the plants of the earth along with animals. Later God forms for Adam a partner cause all the animals couldn’t be a suitable partner. So in conclusion, if the Bible tells a literal account of creation then which one is the true one? Genesis 1 or Genesis 2? And if so should we discard the other in place of the other since both creation accounts contradict each other? Here is a link i’ll provide with what i’m talking about and see Genesis 1 and 2 are literary and not literal. What is the Relationship Between the Creation Accounts in Genesis 1 and 2? - BioLogos
What are you talking about Chris? It wasn’t me who claimed that they haven’t. Or are you claiming that I am a sockpuppet of @Sealkin?
In any case, just because something claims to be evidence doesn’t mean that it actually is evidence. It has to be actually true in the first place, and it has to respect the basic principles of measurement and mathematics. If it didn’t, then we could say things such as “We know that cars can run on gravy because bananas are marsupials and salmon live in trees and eat pencils.”
By that standard, these claims are not evidence. Therefore @Sealkin’s statement is correct regardless.
I feel that he might be referring to something else or he got caught up in the moment and maybe assumed it was me? IDK but I gave a more in depth response to his link.
1 Like
My apologies @jammycakes . It was part of @Sealkin 's post which I misread as being your post. Accordingly I will delete my erroneous post.
This is true that any one method proves the ‘age of the earth’. In science absolute proof of the age of anything without documentation is dubious.
@jammycakes agreed with the Creationists.
I presume you primarily mean radiometric techniques? The accuracy of radiometric techniques dating relies entirely on assumptions that must be extended back over vast periods of unobserved time. The Bible claims the Trinity as an eyewitness account of Earth History so it follows that the Almighty knows the age of things with absolute accuracy better that a dating method that requires essentially unbounded and unreasoned extrapolation.
Assumptions like “universal constants were constants in the past”? I’m okay with those kind of assumptions.
While the Lord God was present at creation the issue is this. If we are to take the creation accounts from a literal point of view then which one? Cause we have two different creation account if you don’t know, Genesis 1 starts off as normal as we all know it, but in Genesis 2 we have a different creation account. First off the earth is a dry, barren dead land, different from the dark watery chaos of Genesis 1. The God has a mist fall on the earth that makes the seas and rivers. Then God forms Adam and then He makes all the plants and animals and later makes Eve as a suitable partner. So, if we are to take the creation accounts literally then which one? Genesis 1 or Genesis 2? I use to be YEC but the issue of discovering two different creation accounts along with scientific evidence for evolution and the age of the earth, along with the issue of dinosaurs and the Flood (still debating if the Flood was real but local or if its a literary story as well) made me leave YEC.
Hi RandomInt,
We can actually look backwards in time by peering far out into the universe. The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, for example, was emitted 13.8 billion years ago, and we observe the CMBR today. Pick an arbitrary date from the present going back as far as 13.8 billion years ago, and an astronomer can find you dozens if not thousands of objects whose electromagnetic radiation (ER), emitted at that arbitrary date, is just now being observed as it reaches us.
So, in fact, we can observe the past.
One of the cool things about ER is that it manifests certain characteristics that rely on universal constants such as the strength of the electro-weak force, the speed of light in a vacuum, and so on. Thus by observing ER from some arbitrary date in the past, we can verify that the universal “constants” were in fact the same at that point in space-time as they are here on earth today.
Whenever astronomers have performed these verification tests, the evidence has always shown that the universal constants have not changed.
I hope this little post has helped you learn something new and helpful today! Have a great day.
Chris Falter
2 Likes
Biologos promotes the popular version of the Big Bang theory, which requires putting universal constants on hold
@RandomInt
Biologos does what now? Could you be a little more specific as to what your claim is and what evidence you are looking at to support that claim?
In science, absolute proof of the age of everything is determined by measuring things.
No it doesn’t. The underlying assumptions can be tested, and you don’t have to have “been there” to do so. This is done simply by cross-checking different dating methods whose assumptions are independent of each other. Here’s just one of many examples:
In any case, even if radiometric dating really were as inaccurate as the young-earth guys claim it to be, they have still fallen far, far, far, far, far, far short of demonstrating that it could be so out of whack that it can’t tell the difference between thousands and billions. In fact, they themselves have admitted that hundreds of millions of years’ worth of nuclear decay has taken place since Creation, and that squeezing that much decay into just six thousand years would have released enough heat to raise the Earth’s temperature to 22,000°C. Twenty. Two. Thousand. Degrees. Centigrade.
I could go into detail about how their claims of evidence for a young earth simply do not stand up to scrutiny, how they do not respect the basic rules and principles of measurement and mathematics, but quite frankly that’s just window dressing. 22,000°C worth of accelerated nuclear decay is a deal-breaker for a young earth. It is simply patent nonsense.
Now I’d suggest you go and learn what the Bible is really about, and not waste your time listening to Pharisees who reduce it to a cartoon caricature and then slather a thick layer of science fiction on top of it.
3 Likes
Interesting. You could use save us all the trouble of figuring out who is the oldest person in the world is at any one time.
True. But stranger things have happened. One day every one who has ever lived will be physically resurrected.
Mic drop incoming.
The Pharisees were infamous for teaching as inventions of God the precepts of men. Since AiG promote a demonstrably more historically orthodox, Apostolic and scripturally based theology than you do. How are they the Pharisees? …well clearly they’re not.
Jesus did take the Pharisees more seriously than the Sadducees though, because unlike the Sadducees they did know their scripture and not doubt the power of God. Which does unfortunately seem to be the raison d’être of this establishment.
Well, yeah, that’s determined by measuring things too.
Really? Things that make the earth look older than it really is? I’m sorry, but I don’t subscribe to omphalism. It is unbiblical.
No, the Pharisees were infamous for taking the Bible so woodenly literally that they reduced it to a cartoon caricature of itself, making their phylacteries long and the tassels on their garments wide and all the rest of it. Just like Answers in Genesis with its dinosaurs on the Ark, 22,000°C accelerated nuclear decay, and insistence that Adam and Eve had pet vegetarian velociraptors. (None of which are in the Bible, by the way.)
In any case, in what universe does reducing the Bible to a cartoon caricature of itself and then slathering a thick layer of science fiction on top of it qualify as “historically orthodox, Apostolic and scripturally based theology”? In every other context that I’ve seen, that kind of thing is known as mockery.
1 Like
Actually, AiG doesn’t promote anything “orthodox” if we use it to that terms. (not saying they aren’t Christian, they are 100% fully Christian, and while they are orthodox in Christian theology that’s about it) The only thing young and recent of Young Earth Creationism is YEC itself. While Christians before the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries might of held to a literal six day creation idea, the very school of though of YEC was foreign until the mid 1800s with the Seventh-Day Adventist inviting the system which Christians Fundamentalist and Evangelicals later on took up. While some of the early church might have understood a literal six day, the idea of what is YEC was unknown to them and many also took on a symbolic view of Genesis 1 and creation. Also, if the Genesis account of creation is to be taken literally then which one? Genesis 1 and 2 are two different creation accounts. Genesis 1 is the normal story we know while Genesis 2 starts off the earth as a dry, dead and barren wasteland, something different from Genesis 1 which has the earth as a watery dark chaos. Then God has a mist fall on the earth which makes seas and rivers. Then God makes Adam and then makes all animals and plants. God tops it off with the making of Eve for Adam. So, if the creation story is to be taken as literal then which one then? Genesis 1 or 2?
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 6 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.