There are many, many young Earth arguments which, if you were to apply them to any other area of science, or even just life in general, you would kill people. This is one of them.
Take driving for example. Thousands of people get killed on the roads every year because of people who believe that intensity can be substituted for time. That’s why we have laws against speeding.
Or what about baking a cake? Ever tried cooking it at 250°C to cut the cooking time in half? I can guarantee you that you’ll end up with something that’s burnt to a cinder on the outside and still completely mushy on the inside.
No, intensity cannot be substituted for time for the simple reason that the evidence left behind by rapid, high intensity events looks completely different from the evidence left behind by slow, gradual processes. Especially when the difference in time you’re talking about is a factor of up to a million.
Here are just two or three examples:
- Rapid high-intensity floods carve out relatively straight channels. They do not carve out twisting and meandering ones.
- Sedimentary rock layers formed from fine particulate matter (e.g. shale) cannot be deposited quickly because the particles can only settle slowly in still or slow-moving water. If you tried to accelerate the process, you would introduce turbulence which would disrupt the sedimentation process rather than accelerating it.
- Zircon crystals cannot get lead into them by any route other than nuclear decay from uranium. If the nuclear decay rates had been accelerated, this would have released enough heat to melt the zircons and, in the process, expel the lead.
They are only huge anomalies for the straw man “uniformitarianism” that young Earthers try to debunk but that no real scientist believes or teaches in reality.
Yes, some processes can and do happen quickly. This is no surprise to anyone. But to demonstrate that the Earth is six thousand years old and that the Flood could have created the fossil record and carved out the continents, you have to demonstrate that everything happened quickly and all at once. I simply don’t see that.
And yes, YECs do exaggerate the extent and significance of anomalies. When you present levels of radiocarbon that are so low as to be all but indistinguishable from contamination, and dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device,” that is exaggerating the extent and significance of anomalies. When you present a minority of radiometric results that differ from each other by 10-20% as evidence that all other results are consistently out by factors of a million, that is exaggerating the extent and significance of anomalies. And when you present tiny scraps of badly degraded, partly mineralised soft tissue remnants in dinosaur bones with no sequenceable DNA in them whatsoever, and portray them as if they were anywhere near being comparable in quality to the woolly mammoths and 2,000 year old bodies in peat bogs, that is exaggerating the extent and significance of anomalies.