Hi Prode,
Personally, I don’t actually believe that life on earth arose all by itself with no outside intelligent help. Abiogenesis is not a solved problem, and I do believe that God was involved one way or another. But that doesn’t take us back to six thousand years.
I’d suggest that if you want to discuss abiogenesis any further, it would be better to do so in a separate thread, as it is getting off-topic.
I’m well aware that YECs claim that omphalos has long been discarded in theory. However, the fact remains that many of their hypotheses (accelerated nuclear decay, hyper-evolution, catastrophic plate tectonics, everything to do with distant starlight) are directly equivalent to omphalos in practice. Basically, what that means is:
- The most obvious, simplest interpretation of the evidence indicates that the earth is far, far older than six thousand years. (Occam’s Razor)
- The proposed hypotheses attempt to provide a basis on which the evidence could be reinterpreted to fit it into six thousand years.
- Said proposed hypotheses are far, far more complex than the most obvious, simple explanation offered by mainstream scientists. They typically involve radical new laws of physics for which the only evidence provided is extremely slender at best, and which raise even more problems (e.g. the heat problem from accelerated nuclear decay) which then require additional layers of radical new physics to solve the problem, which then introduce other problems of their own, until eventually their proponents just throw their hands up in the air and say that God must have done it miraculously.
- Most importantly: the only practical end result of the proposed miracles is to make the earth look older than it really is.
When I read about miracles in the Bible, they all have a very specific purpose: communication – God attempting to get people’s attention. Generally, the more spectacular the miracle, the more important the message. In fact, the Bible refers to them as “signs.” For God to be going to extreme lengths to make the earth look older than it really is – the complete antithesis of the concept of “signs” – sounds a bit out of character to me.