RE: YEC refutation

I am an old earth advocate but I know the YEC claims for your statements. Yes, they don't make sense. My comments are added. Yes, I have become somewhat cynical. If someone won't listen, the arguments don't matter.
 
1. Dating anything using radiometric decay is wrong because it is "just a theory." As Asimov said: Creationists make it sound as though a theory is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

2. Since it is just a theory, this doesn't count either.
 
3. Ditto.
 
4. This is easily explained when you consider sedimentation during a major flood. Different sizes settle at different rates. Obviously this doesn't make sense but, if you don't care to find the truth, you don't care that it doesn't make sense.
 
5. God made the crickets and salamanders without eyes. They didn't devolve.
 
6. The flood or Adam's sin (you choose) caused rapid fluctuation in the magnetic pole. When combined with the flood, the upheaval of the earth and rapid continental movement caused it.
 
7. The fossil record has many flaws. No, we don't need specifics - we believe whomever we want.
 
8. God created the thick coral.
 
9. The earth used to be warm all over, before Adam's sin of course.
 
10. Yes, it could have. Just look at Mount St. Helen's.
 

Dick Fischer <dickfischer@earthlink.net> wrote:

Burgy wrote:

> Is there ONE argument that can be used to show clearly and convincingly
> to a nonscientific person that the earth really really is much older than
> a few thousand years?

Here's ten, that should be enough.

1. Radiometric elements have been produced in particle accelerators with
half lives too short to be found in nature. Due to the earth's great age,
all have long decayed - yet they should be present if the earth was young.

2. Knowing the amount of heat generated when radiometric elements decay,
had all that heat been concentrated in such a short time span postulated by
a 6,000-10,000 year-old earth, it would have boiled away the oceans and
incinerated Noah, his family, and his cargo of animals.

3. Meteorites and moon rocks have been dated with numerous radiometric
techniques and always yield ages in the billions of years. An old moon and
solar system implies an old earth as well.

4. No fossil animal remains have been found in miles thick pre-Cambrian
sedimentary rock. This is completely unexplainable in a young earth,
global flood scenario.

5. Fish, salamanders, and crickets have been found that evolved in caves
over millions of years and no longer have eyes, their having bred in
continual darkness. Young earth advocates cannot explain how animals could
devolve eyes in such a short time period.

6. Magnetizeable materials in the ocean floor are oriented with the earth's
polarity at the time they boiled up at the Mid-Atlantic rift and
solidified. Rock samples taken equidistant from the rift show the same
polarity, and there have been numerous reversals in polarity over the
hundreds of thousands of years of gradual sea floor spreading.

7. The Cambrian, Triassic/Jurassic, and Quaternary Periods have distinct,
identifiable animal life forms associated with them. Only the last period
contains modern man. We do not find any overlap in the fossil record as we
would expect had they been homogenized in a global flood. Cambrian Period
rock contains animals such as trilobites and brachiopods. Triassic and
Jurassic Period rocks contain dinosaur fossils. Quaternary Period rock
samples contain human remains. No dinosaur bones are found in conjunction
with Cambrian animals or with human remains.

8. Coral grows at relatively known rates depending on the species. Coral
has been found nearly a mile in thickness in places that would require many
thousands of years of continual growing.

9. When the continents split apart 200 million years ago, the continent of
Antarctica drifted eventually over the South Pole where it resides
presently. Dinosaur remains have been found there that existed when the
continents were joined together in a temperate climate, but since mammals
did not exist at that time there are no equivalent mammal remains.

10. The sheer amount of coal and oil that has been found in the earth could
not have materialized from the amount of organic material that could have
accumulated in the short growing period between Creation and the flood in
the short time frame demanded by young earth proponents.

Dick Fischer - Genesis Proclaimed Association
Finding Harmony in Bible, Science, and History
www.genesisproclaimed.org

Sheila McGinty Wilson
sheila-wilson@sbcglobal.net
Received on Tue Jun 14 17:19:24 2005