Questions YEC believe support a literal bible narrative of the age of the earth

Faith & Science Conversation
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This is from another individual on another forum. However, i think it helps explain the YEC position…its not that there are no Old Age answers…the point is, these questions found on the link below are supportive of a biblical young earth.

Personally i have more interest in the philosophical/theological and historical arguments in support of the Creation account of the Bible but…a summary is something that is helpful in outlining soe of the scientific questions/problems YEC also have that just happen to be harmonious with the bible account…

Below is a list someone else has compiled:

Im assuming most of these below are from AIG and/or Creation Ministries

(See link for list of questions and statements.)

Thread ‘Questions that evolutionists and billions of years proponents cannot answer but disprove their theories.’ Questions that evolutionists and billions of years proponents cannot answer but disprove their theories. | Religious Forums

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One that did get my attention that i hadnt researched before was the Nebraska Man…

Nebraska Man was a name applied to Hesperopithecus haroldcookii , a putative species of ape. It was heralded as the first higher primate of North America. It was originally described by Henry Fairfield Osborn in 1922, on the basis of a tooth found by rancher and geologist Harold Cook in Nebraska in 1917. Although Nebraska man was not a deliberate hoax, the original classification proved to be a mistake, and was retracted in 1927.

I accept that the above has easily been explained away by Evolutionary Scientists, however, one must accept that if individuals are willing to attempt to construct a narrative from just a single tooth, then lead unknowing individuals into an entire narrative that is false with very convincing artistic imagery…???

That isnt the only example of this kind and its very problematic given that the secular world view dominates evolutionary science research and conclusions!

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I edited out the cut and paste as everything is in the link and can be easily found, and we discourage long cut and paste articles for a variety of reasons.

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Sorry you disagree. We are all guests of our host, and we should not waste their bandwidth. Long cut and paste articles also run the risk of violating copyright law, although probably not an issue since this is from another forum. It is fine to post a link and give an excerpt that you wish to discuss. I will delete the repost you posted following your threat that I see came up while I am writing this, and if you persist further action will be taken.
Again, you can pick one or a few and discuss one at a time, and the full text of your cut and paste comes up immediately when you click your link, so all is readily available.

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Despite disagreeing with your format, your initial post does bring up a good question

In reviewing the questions, the first thing that stands out is that many of them are questions of general knowledge and have nothing directly to do with evolution, but are simply science questions. Science by its nature does not claim to know all the the answers, but is an attempt to learn answers appropriate to it. So I think some of the problem of YEC with an old earth is a general misunderstanding of science, and a conflating of science with philosophy/religion. I would agree that many old earth adherents also make that mistake and look to science to explain questions it cannot answer, so there is a lot of company.

Regarding Nebraska Man, I think we have looked at the history of that one, and I would place it in with the sad hoaxes like the fake giant bones and fake footprints made popular on some creationist sites in the past. Actually, I think it is a step forward for AIG to have discouraged the use of some of the more obvious false arguments.

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Jim picking one or two out seems a bit pointless…individually these items have been discussed before. That is not the title of the thread and wouldnt that be a little offtopic?

I am also trying to avoid the issue that another religious group are well known for…

Jehovahs witnesses tend not to read outside of their own publications.

There is a habit among some individuals to do this kind of thing…so they dont click links to outside “stuff” and read it.

Now if this list was on the Biologos website, the above would be a non-issue. Does Biologos have a concise summary of the counterclaims to its beliefs where it addresses them? (btw i recognise the obvious counter criticism that other groups dont do this)

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Terry (you have removed your post with the link to Gospel of Christ as the source of this infomation…???
(Moderators note: I removed it as it did not seem appropriate to the post or the forum-Phil)

Terry do you think the Gospel of Christ came up with that list all by themselves? I very much doubt they are the ones who did all the scientific research…its pretty obvious that AIG and Creation Ministries are at the heart of the list as i have seen almost all of the claims published by AIG and Creation Ministries before.

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“What was the first living thing made of? Was it DNA? Was it RNA? Was it just proteins? Was it some mix?
What was its code? How many amino acids did it have? When did it come into being?
How many kinds of proteins did it have? How many of each?
Where did it come into being? In space? In the atmosphere? In the ocean? In a tide pool?
In clay or mud? What protected it from UV rays? What was the composition of the atmosphere at that time?
If it was in water, how did the amino acids keep from being dissipated by the water?
What was the energy source for these reactions?
Where there any enzymes in it? Which ones? Certain required reactions need enzymes as catalysts. If not, the reaction may take a vast number of years. Surely the primitive thing could not last more than a minute much less than many years.
How did it survive? Where did the protective layer come from? What was the protected layer? How did that part get reproduced?
How was it able to divide itself? The protective layer must also divide and then close.
What was its food source? How did it remove waste? How did it repair itself? How did these things move in and out of the protective layer since they must be gated.
Please explain how it was ever able to reproduce itself.
If the first living thing was just proteins, how did it ever get evolve to use RNA? It is irreducibly complex. You need all the parts to be working for it not to be destruction.
If it was RNA based, how did it to ever evolve to use DNA? It is irreducibly complex. You need all the parts to be working for it not to be destruction.”

These are all about abiogenesis, not evolution, and are thus irrelevant to the issue at hand.

“Please explain how anything that is irreducibly complex evolves.”

It’s not irreducibly complex.

Please explain how the eye came to be. It is irreducibly complex. It happened independently more than once. Please explain all of these plus hearing, smell, and taste.
Please explain how flight came to be. It is irreducibly complex. It happened independently more than once. Please explain all of these.
Please explain how blood clotting came to be. It is irreducibly complex.
Please explain how the first multi cell creature came to be.
Please explain how the bone tissue came to be.
Please explain how the citrus cycle came to be. It is irreducibly complex.
Please explain how ATP came to be and how the first creature that used it evolved that capability. The mechanism is irreducibly complex.
In fact, there are many things in living things that are irreducibly complex. Please explain how any of them evolved.

These being irreducibly complex is an unprovable assertion. [See thread about irreducible complexity]. All of these would be (or are) useful even at low efficiencies.

The science seems to have identified mitochondrial Eve and the recent origin of x chromosome Adam. This matches recent creation and destroys evolution. Why?

If I remember correctly, that is a misunderstanding of those terms.

Short lived comets are a problem for long ages of the universe. Why?

I’ll concur. Why is that a problem? All of them of which I am aware can be readily explained through gravitational perturbations.

Where are all the remains of all the people that have died? Where are all their artifacts? If mankind has been around for 100,000 years, there must be a lot more than has been found. Why?

People are flimsy, they live on land in warm climates a lot of the time, there weren’t very many of them until very recently, and for a lot of their history, they had very, very few material possesions.

If evolution is gradual, there should be millions of chains of missing links. All are missing. Why?

The claim that all are missing is only possible to maintain by dismissing the thousands of readily findable examples.

There should also be partially developed organs, etc. in all individual creatures right now and that have ever lived. There are not why?

The problem is finding fossil organs at all, because they decay so readily.

The odds against these 2 things are mind boggling.
They should be finding missing links every day. Why not?

They are. It’s just that most people don’t get excited about “New finding of transitional form between Pelycidion matthewsi and Pelycidion megalomastoma” [tiny snails].

How do you explain the Cambrian explosion? Within a short time, all the basic body types appear fully developed. The trilobite just appears and yet it has one of the most complex eyes.

1. It took place over about 70 million years; 2. Punctuated equilibrium is an old notion by now.

Why are there living fossils?

They found smoothing that worked and change has been inhibited because of “it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

How does one explain polystrate trees?

Episodic rapid sedimentation.

How does one explain soft tissue and blood vessels in dinosaur tissue?

Tough soft tissue lasts a while, as does mineralized soft tissue.

How does one explain dinosaur tissue with DNA and other biomolecules still being intact?

They don’t exist. What have been found are breakdown products and tiny pieces of biomolecules.

How does one explain dinosaur tissue, and diamonds that are not C-14 dead?

Contamination is the source for the C-14.

Why is there too much C-14 in some samples of coal and fossilized wood?

Contamination is the source for the C-14.

How do you explain ancient microbes revived?

Super long-term inactivity, and/or contamination.

How do you explain parentless polonium 210 radiohaloes in granites?
How do you explain elliptical polonium 210 halos in the same strata with circular halos?

Why are those issues for an old earth?

There is a great deception in some of the ages that are quoted by evolutionists. Why the deception?

First, give me evidence of this deception.

There are inconsistencies in the radioactive dating results of many things. So isochron dating has been used. But even then, there are many large discrepancies. Why?

Someone did something wrong or a sample was contaminated.

The inconsistencies in the dating of things and in all “clocks” used to set the age of things can be simply explained if some miraculous events occurred. These would be 6-day creation, the fall of man and the curse on creation and the worldwide flood about 4500 years ago.

That does not explain radiometric dating at all.

What is the recipe for primordial soup, and can I buy a can of it?

It’s an idiomatic term, and is irrelevant.

There is a lack of a 50-50 racemization of amino acids in fossils. Why?
Why do living things have all left-handed amino acid. How did that happen by random processes?

We don’t know.

There are discontinuous fossil sequences in the fossil record. Why?

Which sort of discontinuous?

Oil, coal, and opals can be formed rapidly under certain conditions. Why the deception?

What deception? Those conditions are really rare.

The evidence is that the coal beads and fossilized wood were formed rapidly. Why?

Examples?

There are missing layers representing millions of years. Why?

Ones due to erosion?

Why are there ephemeral markings at the boundaries of layers? That shows rapid deposit.

What sort of markings? I need more details to figure out what this means.

The Great Barrier reef is only 4200 years old; the oldest tree is only 4300 years old. Why?
The age of the Sahara Desert is only 4000 years old. Why?

That’s how long the oldest species of tree live? And exactly the technique for determining that age proves some of the nearby trunks to have originated over 10,000 years ago. As for the others, climate shifts.

If intelligent man was around for 100,000 years or more, Cro-Magnon for about 40,000 years, why did he not figure out how to drop a seed in the ground and farm? How did they go from nothing to farming?

Hunting and gathering is way lower-effort than farming. And there is an intermediate: semidomesticates

Why does this phenomenon occur in diverse places around the world at the same?

The climate got drier and colder and it got harder to live nomadically?

Where are all the structures that the built? The pyramids are about 4200 years old. How did they go from nothing to that? And this phenomenon occurs in many parts of the world about the same time?

Destroyed, or just ignored by this–there are city from over 9,000 years ago.

Where are all the writings from before 6000 years ago? Yet they go from nothing to writings. Why does this phenomenon occur in a number of places around the world at the same?

Having enough of an administration to bother or have time to do so appeared about then?

Why are there no calendars over 6000 years?

Having enough of an administration to bother or have time to do so appeared about then?

History is too short. Why?

Why is this an issue?

There is too much helium in radioactive rocks. Why?

It was measured improperly.

There is helium in old zircon crystals. Why?

It got trapped there.

Thick sedimentary rock layers bent beyond the fracturing point, yet not fractured. Why?

Most of them did break, and the YEC sources lie about them.

The Mississippi river delta and deltas around the world show the result of one large flood like the worldwide flood. Why?

No, they don’t. They show very long-term patterns.

The arms of spiral galaxies should no longer exist, but they do. Why?
There is not enough helium in the earth’s atmosphere to support an old atmosphere. Why?
There is not enough sediment at the bottom of the sea to support an old earth. Why?
High speed objects in globular clusters show that they are young. Why?

These are all just plain wrong.

Living fossils invalidate not only the age and origin of the sedimentary rock but refute evolution over eons.

This is a non-sequitur.

The natural direction of life is degeneration not evolution.
The genetic load in all creatures means they would have ceased to exist after so much time. They have not. Why?

If this is true, why do bacteria exist at all?

The DNA, RNA, and proteins with some of these being enzymes is a triply interconnected irreducibly complex system. Evolution could not be the mechanism to produce these.

This being impossible is an unsupported assertion.

There are depictions of dinosaurs from ancient cultures. Why?

They saw bones? They were creative?

Job 40:15-19 describes a plant eating dinosaur, probably Brachiosaurus. Why?

Probably not a dinosaur: Job and Dinosaurs

Almost all ancient cultures have a record of a worldwide blood and a remnant saved on a great boat, sometimes 8 people. How do explain that?

I think that the flood was probably a major regional one, with surviving cultural memories. Also, floods happen in a lot of places.

There are about 30,000 figurines of dinosaurs date about 2500 years ago. How do you explain that?

Are you sure that those weren’t fakes? And that they actually depict dinosaurs?

All population growth statistics invalidate mankind being around for more than 6000 years old but match only 8 people being saved in the ark. It also matches the world population at the time of Christ and today.

Where is this data from?

It does not seem that there is enough force for the Indian sub-continent to have crashed into Asia and raised the Himalayan Mountain range with just plate tectonics. Why?

How is there not enough force?

The dim young sun paradox invalidates long ages for the sun, evolution, and life on the earth.

How?

The rate of recession of the moon from the earth limits the age of the moon.

How?

The rapid decline of the Earth’s magnetic strength limits the age of the earth. Why?

That’s a data artifact from looking at a tiny blip of data and ignoring the rest of it.

The salt content of the oceans is too low for an old earth. Why?
The concentration of various minerals in the ocean limits the age of the oceans. Why?

How is it too low? There is a cycle length for different compounds. By this logic, they can’t be more than a few years old, given a few elements.

The rock layers show no signs of erosion between layers. Why?

Wrong.

There is no time between rock layers for slow deposition. Why?

Wrong.

There is not enough erosion of continental plates for an old earth. Why?

Wrong.

Earth is not cooled enough for it to be old. Why?

Wrong.

Earth’s rotation rate is slowing for it to be old. Why?

Wrong.

Haeckel’s drawings were not accurate, yet his drawings are still used for evolution. Why the fraud?

I have yet to see them used, other than for history.

Nebraska man was not a man. Why the fraud?

People realized it was one a while back.

The Milken experiment is a disaster for evolutionists. Why the deception.

What was this again?

Beware of the old con “the building blocks of life”. Why the deception?

What does this mean?

Please explain how asexual reproduction evolved into sexual reproduction. Without all things working the switch over leads to the destruction of the creature. But there is no survival advantage to the incomplete system.
Please explain how asexual reproduction evolved. It too is irreducibly complex.

Again, these are empty assertions.

Okay, let’s apply the “any evidence against disproves it” to YEC: explain shallow marine fossil deposits, radiometric dating, sequence stratigraphy, and oil companies using old earth models.

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I had to look into this one and i have reference from stack that examines the claim that the experiment was flawed (which is the usual Evolutionary response to its conclusions)

The criticism…

an examination of Millikan’s private laboratory notebooks indicates that he did not in fact include every droplet for which he recorded data. He published the results of measurements on just 58 drops, whereas the notebooks reveal that he studied some 175 drops in the period between November 11th, 1911 and April 16th, 1912. In a classic case of cooking, the accusation goes, he reported results that supported his own hypothesis of the smallest unit of charge and discarded those contrary results that would have supported Ehrenhaft’s position.

The counterclaim to the criticism

At first glance, this procedure certainly appears questionable. But one needs to dig deeper. The notebooks also contain a calculation with the comment “This is almost exactly right, the best one I ever had!!!” And yet Millikan did not include this drop either in his crucial 1913 paper. These discarded measurements, the good and the bad, were all part of a warm-up period during which Millikan gradually refined his apparatus and technique, in order to make the best determination possible of the unit of electric charge. The first observation that passed muster and made it into print was taken on February 13th, 1912, and all of the published data were taken between then and April 16th. This period of roughly two months is what Millikan refers to when he talks about “60 consecutive days,” although the interval was actually a bit longer (63 days), in part because 1912 was a leap year.

During these nine weeks Millikan recorded in his notebooks measurements on roughly 100 separate drops. Of these, about 25 series are obviously aborted during the run, and so cannot be counted as complete data sets. Of the remaining 75 or so, he chose 58 for publication. Millikan’s standards for acceptability were exacting. If a drop was too small, it was excessively affected by Brownian motion, or at least by inaccuracy in Stokes’s law for the viscous force of air. If it was too large, it would fall too rapidly for accurate measurement. He also preferred to have a drop capture an ion a number of times in the course of observation, so that he could investigate changes as well as total charge, which had to be an integer multiple of the fundamental unit, e.

[…] He had no special bias in choosing which drops to discard: Allan Franklin of the University of Colorado reanalyzed Millikan’s raw data in 1981 and discovered that his final value for e and for its margin of error would barely have changed had he made use of all the data he had, rather than just the 58 drops he selected.

My concern…

I am trying to determine if the name of the experiment is a spelling error thus confusing it with the Miller Urey test from AIG that is supposed to show that abiogenesis cannot occur?

I dont know much about either experiment however, its clear that even the second one mentioned has issues…

In contrast to the general notion of early Earth’s reducing atmosphere, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York reported the possibility of oxygen available around 4.3 billion years ago. Their study reported in 2011 on the assessment of Hadean zircons from the Earth’s interior (magma) indicated the presence of oxygen traces similar to modern-day lavas.[26] This study suggests that oxygen could have been released in the earth’s atmosphere earlier than generally believed.[27]

In November 2020, a team of international scientists reported their study on oxidation of the magma around 4.5 billion years ago suggesting that the original atmosphere of the Earth contained little amount of oxygen and no methane or ammonia as presumed in the Miller–Urey experiment

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The question of why these questions are asked in the YEC literature is perhaps obvious: They are asked in the YEC literature to target YEC adherents and produce a culture of fear of the other, and tribal identity. They are not asked of the science community (Kudos to Adam who just did, so generalizations always have exceptions!)
With the political or culture war organizations, appealing to emotions is a proven tactic. Seldom do you get a flier or email saying, join us and give money because we are doing great work. Instead, they say how you are needed to help fight against some outside threat. So, I would say these questions are not in search of answers, but are an attempt to create and solidify identity. Something that those on all sides are guilty of at times.

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On the other forum hosting this wall of questions, you posted

unfortunately for YEC Christians, the above information is not even allowed on many forums in the public space.

Total baloney dude. Almost all these questions have made it on to the Biologos forum; just use the search function. But the discussion on the site you referenced, with hundreds of meandering and disjointed posts of little substance, is exactly why a Gish Gallop as purported gothcha questions, covering dozens of topics, is a terrible idea. I could come up with a list of dozens, hundreds, thousands, of such questions posed to discredit YEC [ do you doubt it? ], but that would achieve nothing. If you think even one of these questions deals a mortal blow to science, start a thread for it.

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This is a prime example of how YEC don’t understand science. The initial identification actually was questioned

Further field work established the identification was incorrect and was caused by “the original specimen was severely weathered.” Science is self correcting and this is a prime example of how that actually works out. Why would this be considered problematic unless you are just trying to spread a mistrust in science?

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I’m no biologist but even I can tell that the majority of these reduce down to “Nanner-nanner”.

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In university astronomy we calculated the expected density of the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt from the cloud that formed our solar system, then calculated expected orbit distribution from the cloud-collapse dynamics. One result was that we should expect short-term comets.

Actually, from Spirit Lake at Mt. St. Helens we’ve discovered one simple method: Thousands of trees were deposited in the lake by the eruption and they sank. Someone got to wondering how they piled up on the bottom and discovered that for the most part they didn’t pile up, they sank roots first and hit the bottom standing up – and remaining standing up, like a ghost forest.
The condition that allowed this occurs in many deep lakes and even on continental shelves: very cold water and negligible oxygen. As the decay rate is too slow to be measured, it is expected that Spirit Lake’s “forest” on the bottom will be covered by sediments that will accumulate over something like a million years (barring another eruption).

Yeah, that one’s a bit screwy. I recall looking at rapidly-covered coal beds, which can be distinguished by abundant fossilized plant parts, but I don’t recall any instances where the beds actually turned to coal rapidly – that would be fun to study!

Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Underwater landslides. Large floods from breached containment of lakes.

But yeah, the term is broad; it essentially means any sort of surface of a geological layer that shows movement by air or water that is sandwiched between smooth-surfaced layers. They’re not a problem at all.

And the ones that didn’t break show characteristic signs of incredible age because rock and crystals can only deform at maximum rates that have been measured in the lab – and indicate that the world’s youngest mountains are at a minimum many hundreds of thousands of years old.

Also human civilizations grew up by rivers, even ones on sea coastlines. Rivers flood, sometimes massively. Breaches of lakes can also result in massive floods.

This one is a total joke – it’s assuming a rapid collision, not one happening at a few centimeters a year. And the rocks in the Himalaya don’t show evidence of rapid collision, they show evidence of being many hundreds of thousands of years old.

My insertion there. These brought me the best laugh I’ve had in a long time, especially the top one which belongs in fifth grade science.

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Most certainly – many could be answered by high school students and are thus either insincere or seriously ignorant.

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I’ll concur–I’m in my first semester of college, but I’m not exactly a normal person of my age when it comes to geology and paleontology.

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And to make the people that believe YEC feel good about themselves. As Dan McClellan likes to say:

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Interestingly that sounds a lot like one of my botany professors regarding proposed explanations for the emergence of flowering plants: She was not impressed by most of the proposals (in fact read a couple of papers to us in class because they were so outlandish they should have been comedy). Her point at the time was not to waste time speculating when there’s not enough data to hang a single blade of grass on.
That actual botanists could get so creative and get their ideas published in journals was shocking to me back then, but I guess it’s a human weakness to spin stories we can believe regardless of actual information.

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Note that the basic approach taken here is dishonest because it’s a double standard. What of the countless things for which YEC has no good answer? The goal of such compilations is not to make an honest argument and consider the evidence fairly; the goal is to pile up claims so as to deceive people into thinking there are loads of problems for old-earth views while making it difficult to deal with each individual false claim.

As to Nebraska Man in particular:
Henry Osborn received a fossil tooth and thought it was from a hominoid. Others disagreed, but Osborn was not one to be careful. He published a description of it as a new genus and species of ape. A newspaper came out with a picture based on Java man, but even Osborn thought that was ridiculous. Excavation soon showed that it was a molar from a peccary, not a hominoid, nor a pig. Humans, peccaries, and pigs all being omnivores, we have fairly similar-looking generic chewing molars.

Thus, further investigation by old-earth workers led to correction of a mistake that had gained little support, within a few years. The incident is evidence for the reliability and honesty of old-earth science.

This correction to the young-earth claims about Nebraska Man has been available to anyone looking up the information since the 1920’s. Yet young-earth sources continue to cite it as proof of the unreliability of paleontological research, ignoring corrections to their claims. Thus, Nebraska Man actually provides evidence that one should not trust young-earth sources.

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“The science seems to have identified mitochondrial Eve and the recent origin of x chromosome Adam. This matches recent creation and destroys evolution. Why?”

Like much of the list, this is both sloppy and dishonest. Anyone who doesn’t know whether X or Y chromosome is the male chromosome in therian mammals is not likely to be a good source of information on biology. Both mitochondrial “Eve” and Y chromosome “Adam” date back over 100,000 years and are incompatible with young-earth teaching. Both fit into an overall evolutionary genetic sequence, contrary to antievolutionary claims. The assertion that they match recent creation and clash with evolution is pure propaganda. Again, when one investigates in any detail, this shows that it is the people who produced the list, not the scientists that they are slandering, who should not be trusted.

If anyone truly wants to promote young-earth creation as a biblical option, they should strive for good quality arguments and seek to stop the use of bad arguments to promote creation science.

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