Objections to vast ages of earth

Faith & Science Conversation
33

I’ve seen several critiques of these young-earth evidences that don’t actually address them properly. Arguments such as “there’s a lot of evidence for an old earth” or “so-and-so says this” or “these are just eccentricities” aren’t very helpful because they don’t actually pinpoint specific problems, and in many cases descend into ad-hominem attacks and appeals to authority.

That isn’t what’s needed here. What’s needed here is some kind of discussion on exactly what standards an objection to an old earth should be expected to meet, whether or not these YEC objections actually meet those standards, and if not then why not.

Here are a few examples of questions that I’d ask. Others may wish to add more:

  1. Is it backed up with hard facts and figures, or does it just make a broad claim of “that’s implausible”? Take soft tissue remnants in fossils, for example. What exactly was found, how much exactly do we know about rates of decomposition, DNA fragmentation and fossilisation, and can we put some hard figures on just how implausible it is that these fossils were indeed 68 million years old? Similarly, exactly how fast should we expect the moon’s core to have cooled and why?

  2. Is it based on robust, stable, time-independent chronometers? Or on phenomena that are likely to have varied significantly with time, are susceptible to environmental or climatological conditions, or are difficult if not impossible to pin down with any accuracy? This criterion raises serious questions for arguments based on salt or sedimentation rates in the oceans, for example.

  3. Is it well within the observational or experimental limits of that which is being measured? For example, just how much carbon-14 was found in coal, oil and diamonds, and was this sufficient to be able to rule out contamination and known background effects?

  4. Has it been replicated by multiple independent teams? You can’t call something scientific evidence if it’s based on a single study by a single team because there may be unforeseen systematic errors or confirmation biases. (Classic example: cold nuclear fusion.) Have the findings of the RATE project on helium diffusion in zircons been replicated by anyone else, for example?