Y’all missing the point. YEC claim that the 
was created all ready for our use. So there would have been soil and everything else needed by humans and animals…
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Great point. Which is why I used fossils (and earlier, mega arthropods), as examples. Neither of those things are necessary for humans and animals to live. But in a young earth we’d expect to find none, or very few, of the former and plenty of the latter.
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The setup to this was thread was
So when you examine soil you can determine the parent rock and physics gives you an estimate of the time required for erosion to create the particles. There are so many things that have a history “built in” that I don’t know what would be left if you threw them all out. Mountains would look uneroded. The Niagara Falls wouldn’t be in their current location.
@jammycakes what are you looking for?
Define “fossilization”. The level that most non-leached fossil shells are at (ignoring amino acid racemization or protein degradation, which are another set of dating methods that independently line up very well with radiometric) is essentially “it’s been buried long enough to lose most of the pigments, none of the muscles are left, but the bivalve ligaments are sometimes still there”, so more than a few decades, but not necessarily tens of thousands of years.
Aragonite leaching, however, seems to take hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of years (freshwater is somewhat faster than marine). Thorough mineralization normally takes way more than 6000 years.
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Just some things that we can say to YECs, “Look, if the earth really were six thousand years old, this is what we would expect to see. Do we?” Or something like that. And the usual general discussion around it.
Apart from the odd foray or two into discussions of omphalism, and the occasional YEC demanding that we reject the evidence of our eyes and our ears as their final, most essential command, the conversation has generally remained on track.
But they don’t listen or engage the evidence, they just prattle back prerecorded contradictions of reality.
Interrelated with what a young earth would look like, is the view that the flood was literal and global. I suppose you could be a YEC and accept a regional flood, but I have not seen that position taken by any.
If you had a young earth and global flood about 1000 years into creation, you would see mountains with sediment washed away down to bedrock, and much of the lower lands would look like the scablands worldwide as the water flowed off as it resolved. Of course those who hold to a young earth would invoke fast moving tectonics and such, as well as rapid evolution of species within “kinds” and other just-so stories, but ultimately the number of divine intervientions to maintain the illusion become overwhelming.
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In some a ways assuming God could be very detailed in his simulating an ancient universe last Thursday that would make quite a few other things simpler. No need for an actual virgin birth. Compared to getting the rings on the trees and the fossils in the ground, doctoring the historical record would be a snap. No need for a virgin birth, water to wine or a resurrection for that matter. No need for a historical Jesus at all. The Bible and historical record can be made to square with very little divine effort. I wonder if any of these deceptions would amount to a bridge too for the Ham handed or is the limitless power of God sufficient?
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and this is exactly true with the exception of your making the assumption that individuals of influence in the world do not attempt to corrupt truth! Therein lieth the fundamental flaw in your entire belief system of Theistic Evolution…you claim that truth is not corrupted by Evolutionary proponents who deny the existence of a creator (which is by far the vast majority of them and I would argue is the entire basis of the theory…if there is no God, how then did we get here)
Waht is very evident is that the research from Dr Kurt Wise, Andrew Snelling, Stephen Myer, Michael Behe, Stephen Jeanson…and many others are now digging up is overwhelmingly in favor of a direct reading of the Biblical story of creation, the fall of man, and the flood.
I mean think about it, if you are designing a functioning system, do you design a system that is not yet functioning? Of course not, that is an absurd idea…no system in and of itself ever works this way. Why then would God “have to” design only the model of evolution and then have no further input into it becoming self aware? God himself specifically is recorded by Moses as “speaking everything into existence”.
God came down close to Adam and “breathed the breath of life into his nostrils”. I would love to see you produce a consensus of English literary experts who collectively agree that one should illustrate that statement by Moses any other way than exactly how I interpret it!
If God is outside of space and time thus creating from nothing, why do you place restrictions on His creative abilities by saying that a fully developed system is not within His abilities?
I do not accept that it is reasonable to put the secular (without God) argument out there that science observes God did not create a mature fully functioning universe. The above mentioned scientists (among a rapidly increasing number of like minded scientists) are now discovering that the secular view is grossly inadequate and in fact there is plenty of strong evidence supporting the Biblical Creation and Global Flood accounts exactly as written.
Except when it’s not … which thus far has been … all the time. Here’s the pattern that keeps repeating for everyone to watch: alleged evidence for YEC beliefs are brought out and examined, and cannot stand up to examination. It falls apart.
Meanwhile, evidence for an ancient earth is put forward, and you are asked to consider it under the most glaring lights you can subject it to … tell us what you think is wrong with it … and we get … crickets.
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Adam, I assume no such thing. I am fully aware that individuals of influence in the world attempt to corrupt truth. Anyone who assumes that individuals of influence in the world do not attempt to corrupt truth is very, very naive.
But there is a limit to how much truth you can corrupt with limited resources. For the earth to be six thousand years old, yet for scientists to be reporting the level of intricate detail, precise measurements and self-consistency in support of an ancient earth and evolution that they do, you would need far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far more than just “individuals of influence in the world covering up the truth.” You would need millions of scientists worldwide to have been colluding with each other to fabricate and fudge evidence in extraordinary detail on an industrial scale for more than two hundred years. The financial cost of such a deception would run into the trillions of dollars.
Such a deception would have to include scientists and ex-scientists who not only had no incentive whatsoever to keep quiet about it, but every incentive to blow the whistle. Some geologists and evolutionary biologists no longer work in the field but have moved on to other industries. Some of them have failed to secure postdoctoral positions in the respective fields and are no doubt bitter about it as a result. Some of them live and work in the Middle East, where the prevailing Islamic culture would have them shouting about such a deception from the rooftops if it were actually happening. And some of them are retirees. And then what about other scientists working in other areas of research, competing against it for funding? Do you really believe that they would remain silent if they saw such an extraordinary amount of money going to waste when it could be funding their own more profitable and useful research instead? What about university administrators demanding an account from the “evolutionists” of what they are spending their grant money on? What about politicians allocating funding for it from taxpayers’ money?
Yet despite all of this, where is the evidence of such an extraordinary level of collusion? We never hear a peep about it from anyone. Even YECs, who claim that such a thing is going on, only cite in support of it a handful of isolated cases of fraud (or even just honest mistakes being portrayed as fraud) from nearly a century ago, such as Piltdown Man, Nebraska Man or Haeckel’s diagrams – nowhere near sufficient to establish the kind of levels of collusion we are talking about. Nor do any of the YECs in the US Congress, who are in a position to influence government spending on these areas of research, ever question where the money is going. You will even search in vain to try and find anything about it on Wikileaks.
No, Adam. If evolution and an ancient earth were the product of individuals of influence corrupting truth, that would be the mother of all conspiracies. NASA faking the moon landings, chemtrails, aliens in Area 51, 9/11 being an inside job, and the US Navy covering up the existence of mermaids, would be child’s play by comparison. Yes, individuals of influence corrupt truth. But not on the industrial scale spanning multiple centuries and costing trillions of dollars that you would require to establish your case. Conspiracies of that magnitude do not happen, it’s as simple as that, and certainly not without a lot of people blowing the gaff on it.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Adam. This has nothing to do with secularism. It has nothing to do with denying God. It’s simply a matter of getting your facts straight, being honest about how you interpret the evidence, and being realistic about the kind of deception and covering things up that human beings are actually capable of in reality. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Put yourself in the position of an ancient Hebrew reading Genesis. What of accelerated radioactive decay, accelerated light from distant galaxies, accelerated plate tectonics, and accelerated limestone formation, would be gleaned from the text? All of that is extra Biblical. Did Israelites think dinosaurs were on the ark? Not found in the Bible.
Baraminology is exegetically unsound. Nothing indicates that Moses or whoever penned the Pentateuch, or any of his immediate readers would have thought that lions ever begat anything other than lions, and leopards anything other than leopards. Dogs, foxes, wolves, and jackals; horses and donkeys, all had Hebrew names in the Bible and there is no reason to think that the intention is anything other than the particular names Adam gave. After all, Hebrew names generally had meanings and these Biblical names which were to be taken as actual go all the way back to Adam and Eve. Speciation as envisioned by AiG or CMI is not a teaching of scripture.
The YEC/ID spokespeople you have named are not expounding scripture, they are reacting against science. 99 percent of what they say would not be said were it not for mainstream scientific discovery.
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The first question to ask whenever anyone proposes a conspiracy theory is “What do those covering up the evidence have to gain by doing so?” And not some amorphous abstract gain, but real world, tangible gains. Often times, the answer is… not a lot.
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A few specific examples I’ve seen are “Scientists are inventing climate change in order to get more grant money”. The only people that is plausible to are the ones that have no idea how hard it is to get grant money for anything.
Less plausible still are claims of “Paleontologists have lots of funding if they support evolution.” To which the obvious response is “What about all the amateur fossil collectors, who aren’t getting any money for their work?”
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The Mature age theory is self-defeating…
Agreed. For example, what do the grant suppliers stand to gain by suppressing research into alternatives to evolution?
Your reference to the amateur is a great example too. It’s the secret army fallacy. You know, the Bond villain has a private army that no one knows about even though everyone of the private soldiers, doctors, mechanics, and support staff are all supposed to be real people with spouses, kids, and grandparents, who cut a cheque at the end of the month and pay their taxes. The trope only works because we willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of the narrative.
For the falsity of evolution to be a cover up it would mean millions of companies, labs, governments (some from nations hostile to each other), scientists, chemists, lab technicians, administrators, and amateurs at home, all being in on it. And for what gain?
I mean, surely they can’t all have been duped can they?
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Ken Ham seems to know exactly how many of them were on the ark. If exhibit from his ark museum is to be believed.
One thing that really puzzles me about YEC beliefs is that if they think dinos were on the ark only 5000 y ago, then where they’ve gone? Other animals seem to have stayed with us
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I don’t see how those two concepts are related. God could create a fake history and have the Bible say what it says.
Science says no such thing.
You still haven’t shown how the interpretations of observations are wrong. All you can do is accuse them of being humanistic which would come as a surprise the millions of Christian scientists out there.
This seems to be a tacit admission that one has to ignore the evidence in order to cling to creationism.
What about adjusting biblical theology so that it accurately reflects the facts we can observe around us?
Then how can we see stars billions of light years away if the universe is only 6,000 years old?
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And of course, the way science works, if someone were to come up with a coherent theory that could replace evolution, they would be Nobel prize winners and forever famous. As an example, Dr. Mary Schweitzer by finding soft tissue microfossils and remnants is a household name in the field, when if she had not, she would be swept into obscurity like the rest of us.
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