Refuting Creationism?

The peace of the Lord! I am studying all the chapters of the Bible and the subject that I am is the Creation, I have been in this for 10 months, and I am seeing all the perspectives on it, and I found BioLogos through the book “The Language of God” that Brazilian Portuguese, and I am Brazilian ahhaah, and I was also seeing the Young Earth Creationist perspective, the main representative I saw, at least here in Brazil, was Adauto Lourenzo, a phD in Physics, I wanted to know if you think The ideas and arguments of this teacher are scientifically based and if you can refute them.

Here is a playlist of his lectures:

Adauto Lourenço - Playlist

Thank you for your attention! God bless!

Note: I do not have very good English.

What did you think of your previous thread?

I’m not sure how many of us can go through his list of arguments and refute every single one.

Anyways you might like this list by a real geologist:
https://ageofrocks.org/100-reasons-the-earth-is-old/

3 Likes

@pevaquark

What a great list!

Since I frequently think some of our best whiz-bang biology geeks need a little more balance in their presentation (like some nice objective and neutral rocks … ), I thought I would make the effort to provide the leading sentence for each of the 100 reasons.

This makes it possible for later researchers to get a “hit” on a specific item, and proceed to the link provided with the list.

See on the other side of 6 billion years!

[Start of 100 Reason List]

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100 Reasons the Earth is Old

How do we know from geology that the Earth is greater than 10,000 years old?
1.Tree-ring “long counts” from California, Central Europe, New Zealand, and Scandinavia extend up to ~13,000 years.
[See article for details.]

2.The oldest individual bristlecone pine trees date to ~5,000 years old by dendrochronology (ring counting), which is older than the traditional date for Noah’s flood.
[See article for details.]

3.Long-term records of glacial ice can be dated by counting annual layers beyond 10,000 years.
[See article for details.]

4.Varved sediments with more than 10,000 layers, such as Lake Sugietsu, Lake Van, and the Cariaco Basin, to name a few.
[See article for details.]

5.Radiocarbon calibration curves confirm that annual layers in trees and varved sediments are indeed annual.
[See article for details.]

6.There is no radiocarbon in old samples, despite claims to the contrary.
[See article for details.]

7.Continuous coral chronologies from modern communities (i.e. not buried in sediments) extend throughout the Holocene.
[See article for details.]

8.Secondary cave formations, such as stalagmites, can form relatively quickly (1–2 mm/yr) in tropical climates or where summer monsoons bring large volumes of precipitation to the cave system.
[See article for details.]

9.Large subterranean caverns do not form overnight, especially outside of tropical climates.
[See article for details.]

11.Lake Baikal in Siberia has collected sediments that are inconsistent with any catastrophic inflow from the surrounding region.
[See article for details.]

12.Well developed river flood plains span large areas of temperate and tropical regions of Earth.
[See article for details.]

13.Painfully slow erosional processes in modern deserts, involving wind, ground tremors, or even ice, are the best explanation for some rather bizarre boulders scattered across the dunes.
[See article for details.]

14.Evidence for numerous glacial cycles during the Quaternary (i.e. the past 2.6 million years) is particularly abundant in the northern hemispheric continents of North America and Eurasia.
[See article for details.]

15.Quaternary deposits and landscapes are far too complicated to have accumulated in the ~4,500 years following the Flood.
[See article for details.]

16.Glacial tills from ancient glaciations, such as the ‘Snowball Earth’ episodes in the Late Proterozoic Dropstones in a glacial diamictite from Death Valley, California.
[See article for details.]

17.Continental ice sheets do not form in a matter of centuries, especially those that were more than a mile thick and extended in some cases to southern Siberia and the central Great Plains, USA.
[See article for details.]

18.Human occupations of nearly every continent can be demonstrated beyond 10,000 years, e.g. in South Africa, ruling out the possibility that humans repopulated the Earth after being obliterated only ~4,500 years ago.
[See article for details.]

19.Ötzi the Iceman has frequently made headlines in creationist writings, because they accurately perceive this unique find as a challenge to the young-Earth timeline. The remains of this murdered Alpine farmer date to ~5,300 years old, which YEC’s arbitrarily dismiss as “inflated”.
[See article for details.]

20.Human settlements that are now submerged due to sea-level rise have been documented beneath the English Channel, North and Baltic seas, off the coast of Israel, Florida, and beneath the Black Sea, to name a few.
[See article for details.]

21.Fossils record long histories of migration of animals from Eurasia to the “New World”, which cannot be accounted for in the young-Earth timeline. Large mammals such as mammoth, mastodon, and giant sloth reproduce far too slowly to account for the population sizes indicated by fossil graveyards between Siberia and the Americas.
[See article for details.]

22.There is no record of migration from Central Asia to Australia for many species unique to the land down under.
[See article for details.]

23.Modern oceans are too salty to have been formed only ~6,000 years ago.
[See article for details.]

24.Cenozoic aged marine sediments in the Gulf of Mexico or along the west African and east South American coastlines, for example, are far too thick to be explained by ‘post-Flood’ processes.
[See article for details.]

25.Deep ocean sediments take far too long to settle to have accumulated in less than 5,000 years.
[See article for details.]

26.Volcanic ash beds (sedimentary tuff), frequently used to date sedimentary rock layers, were mainly deposited in dry conditions.
[See article for details.]

27.The geologic column is no remnant of an ancient flood deposit, global or not. Fine details, in the form of thin layers of alternating clay and limestone, or irregular sand deposits that resemble modern river channels, defy catastrophic explanation, which explains why catastrophism has long been abandoned by research geologists.
[See article for details.]

28.There are simply too many sediments buried in the crust to be explained in a young Earth. Contrary to the claims of Andrew Snelling, the ocean floor contains about as much sediment as we might expect after ~160 million years.
[See article for details.]

29.The distribution of sedimentary rocks is weighted too heavily over the continents, which is the opposite of what we’d expect in a global flood.
[See article for details.]

30.Angular unconformities became one of the principal evidences against catastrophism in the 19th century, and for good reason.
[See article for details.]

31.This buried landscape, for which little explanation is needed, absolutely defies Flood geology.
[See article for details.]

32.Sedimentary features in limestone are similar to those forming today in shallow marine environments.
[See article for details.]

33.Exposure surfaces in limestone are recognizable through features like mudcracks, hardgrounds, and karst dissolution.
[See article for details.]

34.Carbonate rocks (limestone and dolostone) comprise more than 20% of all sedimentary rocks, but Flood geologists cannot explain extensive formations of dolostone—(Mg,Ca)CO3—which forms only under unique conditions not seen today in the oceans.
[See article for details.]

35.Flood geology cannot explain the size and presence of massive evaporite deposits in basins like the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean Sea (a small sampling of the world’s sedimentary salt).
[See article for details.]

36.The size and thickness of chalk deposits has frequently been cited as solid evidence against the flood.
[See article for details.]

37.Syntectonic deposits are abundant throughout the sedimentary record.
[See article for details.]

38.Large extensional basins, such as Death Valley and the Great Basin in the US, contain thousands of meters of coarse sediments that were eroded from the adjacent ranges.
[See article for details.]

39.The total offset in large transform faults, such as the San Andreas fault, points to a very long history of slow deformation.
[See article for details.]

40.Radiometric dating confirms that modern slip rates of tectonic plates, as estimated by GPS data, remained relatively constant over millions of years.
[See article for details.]

41.The abundance of oil in sedimentary rocks completely contradicts the young-Earth timeline, because oil cannot form within ~5,000 years at temperatures less than ~300°C—far greater than is found in every oil and gas field today.
[See article for details.]

42.There is too much organic matter in Earth’s crust to have been buried in a single flood event.
[See article for details.]

43.Coal beds defy rapid deposition, because the high concentration of organic matter begins with the slow accumulation of plant material in oxygen-poor swamps (and not by rapid burial of floating forests).
[See article for details.]

44.Coalification (turning plant matter into high-grade coal) is a slow process, which cannot be compressed to the young-Earth timeline.
[See article for details.]

45.If the majority of the Earth’s sedimentary rocks were deposited within a single flood, then those sediments should all be at approximately the same temperature today, and that temperature should be similar to the average water temperature during the Flood.
[See article for details.]

46.Remnants of soft tissue are extreme rarities in sediments older than Quaternary, possibly preserved in a handful of samples around the globe.
[See article for details.]

47.Contrary to what we might expect from a Flood geology scenario, deep reservoirs of groundwater are not remnants of ancient oceans, but were accumulated by infiltrating rain and snow.
[See article for details.]

48.Contrary to YEC claims, polystrate fossils are better interpreted by conventional geology and contradict the Flood geology paradigm.
[See article for details.]

49.Fossilized burrows and marine trackways reflect everyday conditions in ancient ecosystems, where worms, trilobites, or molluscs dug calmly through soft mud on the seafloor in search of food.
[See article for details.]

50.Mudcracks are common features in layers of sand, silt, and clay that are interpreted to have formed in floodplains or shallow lakes and tidal flats.
[See article for details.]

51.Ripples readily form in sandstone under flowing water, but not at speeds required by the Flood. Therefore, the common preservation of small ripples cannot be reconciled with the Flood model, but rather tells us that the sand must have been buried in calm seas with gentle waves.
[See article for details.]

52.Raindrops on the surface of sedimentary layers—these are relatively self-explanatory. If we take Genesis as our guide, sedimentary layers could not be exposed during the course of the Flood, and so we should never expect to find raindrops imprinting their surface.
[See article for details.]

53.Fossilized poop, called coprolite, is found throughout the fossil record alongside the animals that produced them.
[See article for details.]

54.The nature of the fossil record contradicts the expectation of ‘rapid burial’ for most land-dwelling organisms.
[See article for details.]

55.Fine sorting of marine microfossils is inconsistent with the Flood scenario, because specimens of foraminifera, radiolarians, and coccolithophores are approximately the same size.
[See article for details.]

56.Fossilized tracks in eolian (desert dune) deposits, such as the Coconino and Navajo sandstones, are inconsistent with the young-Earth proposition that these sediments accumulated under water.
[See article for details.]

57.The occurrence of widespread, eolian sandstone formations negates any model that cites a worldwide flood to explain their deposition.
[See article for details.]

58.Paleosols are sedimentary layers that show evidence of soil formation by plants and microorganisms.
[See article for details.]

59.Animal tracks in general are evidence of an exposed surface, on which sediments were somewhat coherent (i.e. not too soft, not too hard; imagine trying to preserve your own handprint in cement).
[See article for details.]

60.Fossilized nests, e.g. from dinosaurs, are indicative of stable, everyday ecosystems, and not catastrophic flooding of the continents.
[See article for details.]

61.The Grand Canyon was eroded and widened slowly by annual precipitation, as evidenced by the fact that the North Rim lies further from the main course of the Colorado River.
[See article for details.]

62.The Grand Canyon itself is only deepened episodically during extremely high floods, which do not regularly occur in the modern climate of northern Arizona.
[See article for details.]

63.The walls of the Grand Canyon contain numerous caves with speleothems, implying that the water table once stood high above its present position for extended periods of time.
[See article for details.]

64.Stromatolites and thrombolites are fine-laminated mounds built by algae and other microorganisms.
[See article for details.]

65.Consistent patterns in magnetic reversals recorded on the seafloor strongly support the conventional model of plate tectonics, in which slowly forming oceanic basalts record the dominant magnetic signature at the time they were formed.
[See article for details.]

66.Magnetic reversals recorded on the seafloor correlate to magnetic patterns in land sediments (e.g. Heller and Tung-Sheng, 1982; Cunningham et al., 1994; Ding et al., 1999), vastly improving the dating of continental deposits that lack datable layers of volcanic ash.
[See article for details.]

67.Earth’s magnetic field is not decaying exponentially, but has varied much less over the past 7–9,000 years (e.g. Korte et al., 2011; Nilsson et al., 2014). Magnetic field strength was weaker, not exponentially stronger, for much of this interval.
[See article for details.]

68.The entire field of chemostratigraphy makes no sense within Flood geology. First, the stratigraphic shifts in chemistry—meaning, as we analyze rock chemistry from the bottom of the geologic column to the top—are too large to have occurred during a single year.
[See article for details.]

69.Event stratigraphy, which utilizes abrupt shifts in rock chemistry as time markers, helps geologists to correlate sedimentary rocks from very different parts of the world.
[See article for details.]

70.The mere existence of isotopes is not predicted by the young-Earth paradigm, but makes sense only in conventional astrophysics.
[See article for details.]

71.Short-lived isotopes are detectable only from distant supernovas. These are unstable elements that decay relatively rapidly after formation and so should be absent in a 4.5-billion-year Earth.
[See article for details.]

72.Radiometric dating of chondritic meteorites is consistent between methods and yields ages of 4.56 billion years for our solar system.
[See article for details.]

73.Potassium-argon dating is well known for its potential problems, but still provides one of the best methods for dating ancient volcanic flows.
[See article for details.]

74.The Argon-Argon technique removes most uncertainties about the original presence of excess argon in samples, confirming that K-Ar dates are both real and generally accurate.
[See article for details.]

75.Uranium-Lead dating techniques consider the decay of multiple isotopes (238U, 235U, and 232Th) into stable forms of lead.
[See article for details.]

76.Flood geologists cannot account for the abundance of 230Th in secondary calcite deposits, such as speleothems, carbonate lake sediments, and corals.
[See article for details.]

77.Cosmogenic dating utilizes short-lived isotopes that are created in situ by incoming solar radiation or high-energy particles from space.
[See article for details.]

78.There is too much helium in zircons, contrary to what Russell Humphreys has conjectured in his unscientific analysis.
[See article for details.]

79.Ophiolites are remnants of ancient oceanic crust, which have been thrust onto the continent.
[See article for details.]

80.Cosmogenic beryllium (10Be) is present in volcanic emissions above young subduction zones, but absent in older ocean sediments.
[See article for details.]

81.Large igneous bodies take time to cool, such as those that comprise the core of the Sierra Nevadas, Andes, Rocky Mountains, and other large mountain belts around the world.
[See article for details.]

82.Coarse grains in igneous intrusions confirm that they indeed cooled very slowly, and not by rapid dissipation of heat via water or any other process.
[See article for details.]

83.The intrusive igneous rocks exposed today were formed at great depths, indicating that miles of solid rock had to be weathered and eroded in the past.
[See article for details.]

84.Volcanic sills, which are intruded between sedimentary strata, require that the layers be hardened first.
[See article for details.]

85.Volcanic island chains, such as Hawaii, elucidate the multimillion-year effects of plate tectonic theory.
[See article for details.]

86.Even if one rejects these dates, we must still account for the sheer size of the subaqueous mountain belts, which form gradually by periodic eruptions.
[See article for details.]

87.Volcanoes would have destroyed all life on Earth, assuming that volcanic deposits now preserved in the geologic column had to have formed during a single year.
[See article for details.]

88.Carbon dioxide emissions from volcanic events would have driven atmospheric concentrations to ~50,000 ppm or more.
[See article for details.]

89.Large metamorphic bodies do not form rapidly, but require hundreds of thousands to millions of years’ worth of circulating waters under intense heat and pressure.
[See article for details.]

90.Gemstones and other rare minerals form by slow accumulation of rare elements in magma or in water circulating through rocks.
[See article for details.]

91.Radiogenic isotopes in rocks from the crust to the deep mantle indicate a long history of chemical evolution deep within the Earth.
[See article for details.]

92.Catastrophic plate tectonics is the only way to explain the bulk evidence for plate tectonic theory in a young-Earth timeline.
[See article for details.]

93.There is no evidence of excess heating from catastrophic plate tectonics. According to John Baumgardner, the excess heat diffused by evaporating a ~1.5-km-thick column of water over the oceans.
[See article for details.]

94.Catastrophic plate tectonics cannot explain detailed formation of new oceanic crust, as is observed today at mid-ocean ridges.
[See article for details.]

95.Seafloor basalt is modified geochemically by hydrothermal vents that form in fissures near mid-ocean ridges.

96.Radiometric dating of seafloor basalt has produced a famously coherent pattern of increasing age away from mid-ocean ridges.
[See article for details.]

97.The relative abundance of elements in the cosmos shows distinct patterns that make little sense in the young-Earth paradigm.
[See article for details.]

98.Components of our solar system, including the sun, meteorites, and planets, have approximately the same chemical composition (if volatile elements are excluded).
[See article for details.]

99.Even the RATE team, a YEC think-tank seeking to undermine geochronology, has found no meaningful objection to the validity of radiometric dating techniques.
[See article for details.]

100.Accelerated nuclear decay is science fiction. Neither the physics nor the math produces a result in which radiometric dates yield consistently large ages for rocks and minerals in our solar system. One cannot tweak the physical properties of atoms, so as to increase the rate of radioactive decay, without all hell breaking loose—literally. Rates of decay depend on the stability of individual atoms, so if unstable atoms became more unstable, we’d expect stable atoms also to become very unstable, which would be the undoing of the physical universe as we know it. These are not conditions through which an Ark of humans and animals ever could have survived.
[You don’t need to see the article for the 100th item. It is provided above in its full form.]

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[End of 100 Reason List]

3 Likes

Então irmão Matthew, achei muito bom o meu tópico anterior, aquelas antigas dúvidas foram sanadas mas… apareceu esse Adauto Lourenço e me deixou de cabelo em pé! mas obrigado mais uma vez! Deus te abençoe! já iria gastar mais de R$300,00 com um livro dele ahhaha ainda bem que respondeu antes de eu comprar! recomenda algum livro que fale sobre o BioLogos, sem ser o “A Linguagem de Deus”?

1 Like

You are very funny! I am not sure what books are available in Portuguese, but many of these I’ve personally read and are quite good.

Are there any topics or questions in particular that you want to explore or know better?

Eu engraçado? kkkkkkkk deve ser poque sou brasileiro kkk brasileiros são muito loucos e bem curiosos por acaso! kkk (experiência pessoal comigo mesmo, eu sou louco), entendi vou ler todos! hahah no momento não tem um assunto que queira explorar mais… mas com o andar dos meus loucos estudos, vão aparecer várias! hahahha Obrigado mais uma vez! de que igreja você é?

Você poderia me dizer quem é o autor desse site que você me passou?

Thanks for your work on this, George!

1 Like

Hello again! Hahaha I need the Francis Collins mailing address, do any of you have? I need to send him a letter.