Soft Tissues in Fossils

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@cewoldt

Adam, here is my conclusion. You are not going to change your mind nor am I, and we are not going to change the minds of BioLogos evolutionary creationists, no matter how strong our arguments are. So don’t spend a lot of time trying to do it unless you find value in understanding how others think and argue.

I’m sorry Craig, but that is patently false. You would convince us that the earth is young if your arguments were strong enough.

Look, we don’t just idly dismiss your arguments as not strong enough here. We explain carefully why they aren’t as strong as you think they are. We explain to you what differentiates strong arguments from weak ones. We explain to you exactly what you need to do if you want to challenge a scientific theory, and we even give you examples of what would constitute strong arguments for a young earth. I addressed this particular claim here:

@jammycakes

YECs sometimes claim that no amount of evidence would convince “secular scientists” or “evolutionists” that the earth really was six thousand years old, that the Flood really was global, or that humans and animals really were unrelated. But this claim is patently false. It’s not hard to think of examples of things that would convince scientists that the earth really was that young.

For example:

• We would not see any stars more than six thousand light years away, with additional stars regularly coming into view with measurable distances of one light year further per year.
• Zircon crystals never being found containing more than about eighteen parts of lead per billion.
• We would have sequenced the entire T-Rex genome by now. In fact we would have whole T-Rex carcasses preserved in Arctic permafrost, just as we do with the woolly mammoths.
• Deposits of chalk, shale or other sedimentary rocks formed from fine particulate matter would never be more than a few metres thick.
• Levels of carbon-14 in ancient coals and diamonds would consistently reach as high as 25%-50% modern carbon in almost every sample that was tested. These levels would be consistent across all sorts of samples with very little variation in the lower limit.
• A measurable decrease in the speed of light or radioisotope decay rates of 0.1% per year – certainly well within the sensitivity range of lasers and other instruments.
• Alternatively, strong sensitivity of radioactive decay rates to temperature or pressure.

The fact of the matter is that if you want your arguments to be considered “strong enough,” then they need to consist of honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information. And if you want to persuade scientifically literate people that for more than a hundred and fifty years, the entire scientific community has been not just wrong but out by six orders of magnitude about the entire fundamentals of whole scientific disciplines, then misunderstood, misrepresented, ambiguous or nonexistent evidence, hand-waving, and tiny samples with huge error bars simply aren’t going to cut it.