It would be appreciated if discussion about the merit of AI is directed to the thread on that topic. A plea to the moderators to prohibit posting of screenshots of AI-generated results on this forum
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âthis is a complete misunderstanding and misquoting of not only scripture, but also the YEC model.â As it was not quoting Scripture, such a reply conveys the impression that you are neither listening nor thinking, which does not help your arguments. Scripture teaches that we should not bear false witness and that our work should be of good quality. To deny those is to misrepresent Scripture. . Consider carefully whether an argument is good, rather than grabbing whatever young-earth claim seems to fit what you want to hear.
Cramming all of the events recorded in the geological record into a young-earth timeframe creates far too much heat and radiation for life to exist. Cramming most of it into a single year global flood makes it even worse; the earth itself would be destroyed. Speeding up radiometric decay or messing with the speed of light requires changing fundamental constants of physics, which destroys atoms. Adding and removing enough water to make a global flood produces enough heat to boil away that global flood. These problems are inherent in all modern young-earth claims. It doesnât matter where in there the dinosaurs were in time; those are still problems. But the fact that different young-earth sources make different claims about when is pre- versus during versus post-flood also shows that all claims to have geological evidence of a global flood are false. The global flood of modern young-earth teaching is an all-purpose excuse to explain away any geological features that they think you might have heard of and which clearly reflects a vast amount of time. By claiming that conditions were drastically different during the Flood, they try to evade the fact that natural processes take a long time to produce the results that we see. But if conditions were drastically different during the Flood, it should leave a clear mark in the geological record. If that were true, young-earthers should have no trouble identifying the start and end of the Flood in the geological record. But instead the global flood is used as an excuse to explain away anything that it seems handy for, regardless of its sequence in the geological record and regardless of whether a flood could simultaneously produce the different features all being attributed to it.
Certainly various catastrophes have happened. But claims for catastrophes, or anything else, must be based on an honest assessment of the evidence. Nothing that I have said contradicts the occurrence of occasional catastrophes. But making up catastrophes without regard to the actual effects that such catastrophes would have is not honest. All creation science claims show such disregard for the reality of Godâs laws of nature. They thus directly contradict a major message of Genesis 1, which teaches that God gave everything its proper place and role.
If the last dinosaurs are post-flood, then not one Cenozoic geological feature can be explained by the Flood. But the biblical record, not to mention all other archaeological evidence, is not compatible with having sea level over 100 m above the present level after the Flood. Numerous coral reefs had time to grow well above modern sea level at many times after the last dinosaur . The lack of a coherent young-earth model makes it impossible to show that anything could be produced by the Flood â the creation science claims are just a bunch of handwaving excuses. This highlights the fact that the goal of young-earth creationism is not to honor God by building an understanding of the working of His creation, If that were the goal, there would be correction of wrong claims and an effort at consistency. But in fact, young-earth creationism is an attempt to prop up a legalistic false gospel by slandering the work of honest scientists. It teaches that youâre saved because you reject those evolutionists and their teachings, rather than admitting that we are all justified only by faith in the work of Jesus. As long as the focus is hoping to win arguments instead of truthfulness, creation science will remain garbage.
Again, the headlines about fossil soft issue are badly inaccurate. As the conversational AI has no discernment to identify the best sources, and doesnât even accurately represent whatever sources it uses, its claims certainly cannot be trusted about a topic with much popular misinformation. Seriously, the first âsourceâ is how replicas of fossils are made, which has nothing to do with soft tissue preservation. No, blood vessels are not present. Possible remains of part of the framework of blood vessels have been reported. This is not at all the same as an actual blood vessel. The so-called soft tissue remains from dinosaurs are noticeably chemically altered, are tough and durable proteins, are closely associated with the protective chemical environment of bone, and are only found in occasional exceptionally preserved specimens. No, osteocytes are not present. The spaces where the osteocytes were can be identified, and there may be some remnants from the cells, but the cell itself is long gone. Collagen again is the extremely tough protein found in bone and most other strong structures in vertebrates; preservation of somewhat altered collagen (and other tough organic molecules such as cellulose and chitin) is not surprising. Notice also the word âmineralizedâ - those are materials that have been replaced by minerals, and so are durable. Dino scales, like croc and gator scales, often include bony material to begin with.
There is also significant risk of contamination and misidentification in dealing with possible soft tissue from fossils; for example, the reported possible dinosaur heart was just a rock lump inside the skeleton.
Not counting Wrangel Island, the youngest mammoth material is about 10,000 years old. For very clean samples that are handled very carefully, it may be possible to get 14C dates back to about 70,000 years before you canât tell the difference between your measurement and background noise. More often, about 20,000 to 50,000 is the oldest possible with 14C. But those dates are not compatible with a young-earth position; not only are they older than young-earth advocates admit, they are from the very youngest geological deposits, near the end of the latest ice ages and thus point to a much older age for the earth.
Itâs also worth keeping in mind that Mary Schweitzer is a Christian whose study of geology showed her that young-earth claims are untrue.
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The published material from YEC sources that admits that their model of sped-up radioactive decay would turn the planet into a ball of radioactive plasma?
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Going back to the original post, @Joel_Duff has had a series of blogs and videos that is chock full of these sorts of things that show how the young earth timeline cannot accommodate what we see in nature. My favorites are the series on the Dead Sea and on the canyon beneath the Nile Delta:
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Yes, YEC has no end of geological difficulties in their Biblical back yard, and Joel Duff does a great job on the Nile
The Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt
Part II: Origins of the Nile River Valley
Part III: A Brief Chronology of Events
Squeezing the Lost Grand Canyon of Egypt into the Young Earth Paradigm: An impossible* Task
YEC frequently ask why there are sedimentary formations kilometers in depth, even though that is exactly to be expected given erosion at work over billions of years. But the back at ya question is why are there distinct formations within sedimentary rock which tell of processes over geological time? How do you get flood deposits laid down, then get eroded into a vast canyon, then that canyon completely filled in, and then cities built on top which follows the new river course, in essentially no time at all? All of this directly connected with Mediteranean sea levels and salinity. And all this happening while life goes on as usual in a civilization which extends to prior the date for the flood.
YEC is offside with not just science, but also history. AiG sanctions the year of Noahâs flood at 2348 BC, well before the 1st dynasty of Egypt was underway hundreds of years earlier at 3100 BC, by which time Egypt was already a civilization of a million people with a long past.
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. . . they call God unfaithful.
Which is to say, they set aside Godâs faithfulness.
Which is why so many young people turn away â YEC provides no foundation for faith.
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It is instructive to compare evidence for an ancient Earth to claims of evidence for a young Earth.
| Old earth | Young earth | |
|---|---|---|
| Extent of data | Hundreds of thousands of measurements | A few hundred measurements |
| Sample sizes | Significant sample sizes | Tiny sample sizes |
| Precision | High precision (error bars in the ±0.01-5% range) | Low precision (error bars several orders of magnitude). Many claims have no quantitative basis whatsoever but just appeal to incredulity. |
| Assumptions | Assumptions of constant rates have a strong theoretical and experimental basis for assuming that they were constant. For these assumptions to be incorrect, science fiction-level new physical phenomena would be required (e.g. accelerated nuclear decay, catastrophic plate tectonics) that would have introduced numerous additional problems (e.g. the heat problem). Multiple different physical phenomena would also have to have changed in complete lock-step with each other. | Calculations are based on rates of change that could not realistically be expected to have been constant under any scenario, either old Earth or young Earth (e.g. the Earthâs magnetic field, influx of salt or sediment into the oceans, changes in the Earthâs population). Yet any suggestion that they werenât constant under an old Earth scenario is dismissed as a ârescuing device.â |
| Predictions | Precise and specific | So broad as to be effectively meaningless (e.g. Humphreysâ âpredictionsâ of the magnetic fields of the Solar Systemâs outer planets) |
| Cross-checking | Extensive cross-checking between different methods. Discrepancies are the exception, not the rule. | Ad-hoc, frequently mutually contradictory explanations with little or no cross-checking |
| Standards of peer review | Peer review looks for rigour, factual accuracy, precision, mathematical correctness, and adherence to proven best practices | Peer review looks solely for being âon messageâ about the age of the earth and doesnât even mention accuracy |
| Qualifications of peer reviewers | Peer review carried out by subject matter specialists | Peer review carried out by people whose area of expertise lies elsewhere |
| Reproducibility | Common | Rare if not nonexistent |
| Response to falsification | Findings are discarded if further studies contradict them | Studies that contradict the claims are dismissed as ârescuing devicesâ or âuniformitarian presuppositionsâ |
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Or even millions, given that geology students do such measurements in lab exercises on a regular basis.
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A good example of such wishful data mangling was the creationist embrace of a shrinking sun back in the 90âs, based on marginal work of some mainstream researchers who looked at historical eclipse records in an attempt to determine if the Sun pulsated or was shrinking. The required precision was not available to these old observations. There was never any real doubt among astrophysicists that once a star settled into thermal equilibrium with fusion, gravitational collapse was no longer a real factor. But nonetheless Andrew Snelling wrote this:
We have every reason in fact to be skeptical about the Skeptics and their attempts at answering the powerful creationist arguments if this is the level of their use and abuse of science, other scientistsâ work, and the ethics of writing. Unsuspecting readers should be clearly warned not to be fooled.
But why should the Skeptic author want the answer to his question to be that there is no shrinkage of the sun and no solid, or little, evidence of steady shrinkage?
Because even if we take Stephensonâs bottom-of-the-range figure of a mere 0.02 second of arc per century (tiny shrinkage indeed), this means that, using the evolutionistsâ own uniformitarian assumption of extrapolating this shrinkage rate backwards in time, just as they extrapolate further back 10â15 billion years to the âbig bangâ, only 100 million years ago the sun would have been too large for life to exist on earth!
But this wonât do for the Skeptic author who, like other evolutionists, believes life has been on this earth for at least three billion years, so the sun must not be shrinking. Notice that his conclusion is not based on the evidence, since we have just seen that the solid evidence does support a small shrinkage rate, but on his a priori commitment to evolution, that is, his starting belief in evolution before he even looked at the evidence. Yes, we should be skeptical about the Skeptics and their arguments.
That did not age well.
On could go on. C-decay is another example of YEC manipulating data to fit a desired narrative, which has been abandoned.
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That is something that could only be written by someone who has never applied the brakes on a car, because it assumes that things move at constant rates forever! The parallel would be that since the car is decelerating with the brakes applied, then its speed has been decreasing at that rate into the past, so just hours ago the car was moving at escape velocity!
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The Great Blue Hole, a feature of the Belize Barrier Reef, is a submerged circular sinkhole 125 meters in depth, and a draw for divers. A paper involving this site, An annually resolved 5700-year storm archive reveals drivers of Caribbean cyclone frequency, is a recent addition to the inventory of examples of varve locations where countable varves exceed the catastrophic flood timeframe available. We can thank Joel Duff for another video where he goes over the implications for YEC.
The standard response be YEC is to maintain that in the past there was some ad hoc form of heightened frequency of varve accumulation, but the geology involved extensively contradicts flood geology far beyond just the consideration of varve count. YEC cannot account for the necessary time even for marine organisms such as shellfish, plankton, and coral to cycle seawater calcium into the carbonate feed stock for limestone, nor the time required for diagenesis and lithification to limestone, nor the time required for the vertical cave to form under terrestrial conditions, nor the time required for the now submerged large stalactites to grow, nor the time for global ice melting to raise sea levels to flood the cave. Varve accumulation is just the countable portion of the geological ages involved.
One other thing to note from this study - the difficulty for YEC has nothing at all to do with the objective, which is to investigate the past frequency of cyclones. Scientists are not trying to presume or disprove anything about the Bible, or reinforce some anti Christian worldview. Here, they are attempting to determine trends for storms, not invalidate anybodyâs faith.
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Ron if only you actually read the words you have quotedâŠ
You have done here exactly what that entire article Snelling wrote is actually talking aboutâŠauthors âMISREPRESENTINGâ other authors writings!!!
Snelling is using the claims of the âSkeptic Authorâ and comparing then with the writings which said skeptic is actually referring too. He is highlighting where the skeptic is misrepresenting the published material that is being referenced!
I cant believe you are trying to use this in the manner in which its being used on these forumsâŠwhat you are doing here is a flat out lie! (i would call you a lame-ass but that probably wont go over well!)
Snellings last point is the crux of his entire statement thereâŠthat we should be careful of skeptics and lousy lame-ass arguments!!! (you have completely missed the point there)
No problem. Iâve been called worse things by better people.
I stand by my statements. The Skeptic author drove the point that Stephenson advanced no solid, or little, evidence of steady shrinkage. That turned out to be the case. He, and Snelling (as always), were wrong, and their purported evidence was invalid. Mainstream science allowed for discussion, but in modern times it was always recognized that fusion accounts for the Sunâs energy output, and the discovery of neutrino oscillation laid waste to Snellingâs argument.
This is a good example of YEC seizing on edge problems and ignoring the vast amount of data supporting mainstream science. Scientists, not creationists, identified the deficit in solar neutrinos, and scientists, not creationists, used that information to yield more discovery and understanding. Creationists never discover anything, because they really have no interest, and that would just ruin their apologetics.
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The Neolithic archaeological site, Göbekli Tepe, represents another episode in the continuity of human development extending far prior to the YEC date for the flood. Excavations have uncovered impressive stone circular enclosures containing pillars and facades replete with carvings of animals and symbols.
Located in Turkey, the purported landing region of Noahâs ark, it is instructive to consider some of the contrasts with Ark Encounter. AiG showcases access to comparatively advanced technologies, with life sized dioramaâs displaying Noahâs family industriously engaged in making pottery, blacksmithing, in the study reading and writing, and supplementing diet with produce grown on the ark. At Göbekli Tepe, these technologies are as absent as warp drive and teleportation. Despite the impressive remains and extensive carvings, there is no pottery, no metal, no writing, and no evidence of agriculture or domesticated animals, depicted or found. Göbekli Tepe remains the crown of the stone age.
Göbekli Tepe is developmentally and temporally well prior to the YEC time frame. It was the site of activity for over a millennia, and carbon dating consistent with archaeological analysis places its establishment at around 9500 BC give or take.
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