The difference between apparent age and apparent history may be useful. If God decided to create Adam instantaneously as an adult in a garden with full-sized trees, the trees and Adam would necessarily resemble ones today that are many years old. But it would not be necessary for the trees or Adam’s bones to have growth rings or for either to have scars, etc. Those suggest a history in a way that is not structurally necessary for their existence. Similarly, the wine at Cana would resemble a year or so’s work by a grapevine and some yeast. But there would be no need for it to contain bits of dirt and bugs for extra authenticity, nor to have a label proclaiming “Chateau Naboth, 6 BC”.
Gosse’s Omphalos develops a model of full appearance of history. (Despite the matching title, Sandra Boynton’s Belly Button Book is not based on Gosse.) But that idea has never been popular. As already noted, it is theologically problematic.
And, those sedimentary layers would have no fossils in them, large or small, as a fossil is a historical object.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
23
As this is a young earth (not that there can be any others), this is what (the) one looks like. There will be a bar code somewhere - the strata! - with a date of manufacture, Friday October 28th 4004 BCE. [content removed by moderator] Science has failed miserably to explain how the young earth ‘appears’ ‘old’.
Great question! And it puts the need for proof on the other foot; our YEC brothers and sisters would need to do some 'splainin or simply ignore a lot of evidence that simply wasn’t important during the time of Moses.
Speaking of diamonds–Why is there measurable carbon 14 in every diamond tested, and the same amount, regardless of the strata in which it is found? If they are millions of years old as claimed, there shouldn’t be any.
Most knowledgeable YECs won’t agree that God made the earth look mature. And they do think that it looks quite old, about 6000 years old in fact.
The genetic evidence is that mutations–all most all harmful–are accumulating at the rate of 80 to 100 per human generation. At that rate, after a few tens of thousands of years, we should have gone extinct.
And as we discover more and more about the complexity of the genome and the epigenome, it is clear that it is designed, not evolved, a serious problem for evolution.
Flood geology has advanced by leaps and bounds over the last couple of decades. And fossils on mountaintops and deserts are very consistent with YEC geology.
[quote=“cewoldt, post:26, topic:49296, full:true”]
Speaking of diamonds–Why is there measurable carbon 14 in every diamond tested, and the same amount, regardless of the strata in which it is found? If they are millions of years old as claimed, there shouldn’t be any.
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That is a good proof of an old earth that most diamonds have the same very small amount of C14 measured, which is really just the amount of background noise due to the limitations of the testing process. I am sure that has been pointed out to you before. Therefore, your last statement, that there should not be any, is if not false is at least deceptive, in that the limitations of measurement due to residual contamination and instrument sensitivity mean there always should be a small amount measured, whether it is there or not. You just cannot get to zero.
It’s contamination, Craig. And no, you cannot dismiss contamination as a “rescuing device.” One of the most fundamental and basic rules of experimental science is that you must fully and correctly account for all possible sources of error – and contamination is a very real source of error – before drawing any conclusions from your study. By dismissing contamination as a “rescuing device,” YECs are demanding that in order to accommodate their claims, we must lower our standards to a level that would constitute gross professional misconduct in any scientific workplace.
Your claim that it’s “the same amount, regardless of the strata in which it is found” isn’t even true. The RATE project reported levels between 0.01% and 0.07% modern carbon in deep mined samples, and between 0.03% and 0.31% modern carbon in alluvial samples. That is not “the same amount, regardless of the strata in which it is found” by any stretch of the imagination.
I actually made this point at the start of this thread. Levels of, say, between 5% and 5.5% modern carbon might be something to write home about. Levels of between 0.01% and 0.31% are not.
Seriously, Craig. We’ve been over this again and again and again and again and again. Why do you still keep bringing it up?
Under flood geology, fossils on mountaintops defy the laws of gravity. Have you ever noticed that in modern-day flood situations, lahars and avalanches flow downhill?
Or are we expected to abandon uniformitarianism so completely as to believe that during the Flood, the laws of gravity were somehow suspended without letting the oceans drift off into outer space?
Do you have any citation for this, outside of creationist organizations?
AMS results are below the threshold of measurement, therefore, there is no measurable 14C in diamonds. If this is the best you got, the case for a young earth is done.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
32
Yes! Yes we are!! Science MUST try harder. To make the truth work! Or you burn forever.
(Ed. What’s been on my mind most recently in the light of Uvalde, where the helplessly perverse dominant power faction is blaming mental illness and evil spirits, is that spree shooters are mentally unwell, as a commentator noted, but not ill. We say of Putin that he’s ‘crazy’. No he’s not. He’s rationally helplessly evil. Evil in the sense of extremely unenlightened, being carried away by power, talking oneself in to a frenzy, in to unwellness. No lesions on the brain, no brain chemistry explains that in any way. It’s all easily explained by conditioning. Mental illness can and will result of course. But that’s an effect, not a cause. And so it is with evil, unwell, ‘theology’.)
Even the ones I could respect think the earth had the appearance of age, who like Adam in their reasoning, would have a tell, like missing a belly button or something.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on why we don’t get mega arthropods today if the earth is only 6k years old. Like, for example, Meganeura Monyi a proto-Odonata (dragonfly) with a 75cm (~2.5 foot) wingspan. If seagulls can survive a global flood, why not seagull sized dragonflies?
More strangely, why are Chesapecten and Ecphora never found in deposits much below the Pungo River Fm., and never found above the Duplin Fm. equivalents, except where they are obviously reworked (taphonomy different, no other standard fossils from those layers present, etc.)?
I don’t see how manufacturing tree rings is viewed as dishonest but accommodating false cosmogonies gets a free pass? Why can’t God “accommodate tree rings”? I think reading a mature earth as being a lie or false is purely a cultural thing and lacks any significant basis in reality. The earth runs according to certain laws of physics. If God wanted to make a mature earth with oil he would make it consistent to appear as if the oil formed over millions of years. Why would anyone care if the earth was six thousand years old with the appearance of age or 13.7 billion? There is no functional way to distinguish between them. The proposition is unfalsifiable like imagining we are in a simulation or a brain in the vat. All evidence will show and can be investigated under the idea that the earth is old because the laws governing the universe appear consistent in our investigations. The problem is people are reading a 4,000 year old creation myth incorrectly and assuming it is teaching us modern science. Though I think we have been down this road before
I was under the impression that so called deep time is a constant battle ground for YECs because, if the Earth is young, but appears old then there is not enough time for evolution to take place. Perhaps, I’m misunderstanding you.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
38
The problem is that the mature Earth position requires God to create the Earth with fossils already in the ground. The rocks that supposedly were created with age, and therefore measure in the millions of years old by radiometric dating, are found in strata above fossils. This means the fossils had to be there at the creation event.
With tree rings, the relative age of trees are determined by matching the thickness of rings.
There are overlapping patterns of ring thicknesses that span thousands and thousands of years, going back before the supposed 6,000 year mark for YEC. Also, the 14C content of these trees also follows the same time line with less and less 14C as we move back in time. This would mean God would have to create the Earth with these dead trees already in the ground with overlapping tree ring thicknesses and 14C content to match.
What we are talking about is not maturity. It is a fake history.
Annual rings do not appear in trees just because a year has gone by. They reflect the process of growth during wet and temperate springs followed by dry and hot summers followed by the inertness of winter. As some springs are wetter than others and some summers fail to register much warm weather, rings vary. A tree featuring perfectly identical succession of rings would be just as odd as no rings at all. So does ex nihilo creation go with no rings, identical rings, or realistic rings? The realistic ring option is, well, realistic. Rings tell the story of the seasons, of course, but much more. The stable isotopes vary by broader climate, the prevailing wind is recorded, the lean of the tree produces compression wood. The more maturity looks realistic, the more it looks like actual history. Ultimately, they merge.
