Non-Scientist Young Earth Creationist Has Theories for you to Test

I’d be happy to do so if @thoughtful asks.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Comments on Non-Scientist YEC

What about the dozen of reported cases where young rocks from recent eruptions (<1000 years old) yield greatly exaggerated apparent ages (>million years).
The best way to test the validity of any dating method is to date rocks of known age. Whenever scientists do this they routinely obtain dates that are much older than their true age. If we cannot trust these dating methods on rock or ash of known age, how can we trust these same methods on rocks of unknown age?
Contested Bones; Christopher Rupe and John Sanford.

We’d have to see the actual data. But the most likely explanation, absent the data, is that they were dating xenocrysts.

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Beautifully written.

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@thoughtful, following @RonSewell’s suggestion, how do you make sense of the data I referenced here? Lake Varves, Volcanic Ash, and the Great Isaiah Scroll

Thank you all who replied so far. Unfortunately, I have to bookmark this and come back to the links you shared with me. After filling my brain with Genesis 1-9 and related Bible passages, as I was thinking about universe and human origins, I stumbled upon a 25-part series from the last 3-4 months on the Answers in Genesis website about work Nathaniel Jeanson is doing. He’s claiming that the Y-chromosome mutations fit a 4500 year post-flood world history and are testable with historical events. It was very fascinating and I started thinking about history completely differently now. So my brain is very full with history and science, and now I’m getting into Genesis 10 and following. Obsessive bible study and scientific and historical exploration never hurt anyone, but I do need more sleep. Haha. But it’s been so fascinating. If anyone wants to discuss the y-chromosome theory, I could start a new thread.

As I clicked through the internet tonight, I came across a few fun facts that were sort of the ones I was looking for in my original post:

The water-earth on Day 1 or Day 2 of creation was maybe a sort-of snowball? Great Oxygenation Event: How Oxygen Filled the Atmosphere - Earth How or maybe it wasn’t a snowball at all because from an evolutionary standpoint it had to be cold. Either way, sort of fits my Theory 1 - I guess hypothesis would be a better word.

Also a fun fact from Day 1 and 2: In Depth | Oort Cloud – NASA Solar System Exploration

Bless the Lord, O my soul!
O Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty,
2 covering yourself with light as with a garment,
stretching out the heavens like a tent.
3 He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters;
he makes the clouds his chariot;
he rides on the wings of the wind;

I’ve revised my “Theory 3” a bit - the continents were broken up into mostly the same shape as today, but land bridges and ice age climate change did motivate migration. I’ve decided various homo groups are probably completely bogus, and just describe the range of human features. I have to research more on that why humans sort of melded into more similar features.

Theory 4: All of the different ages/epochs whatever that evolution has come up with are often overlapping and describing the same thing before humans were created, between Adam and Noah and after Noah. It’s very easy to find some history of Noah’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and much of it is now only recorded in legend. Because of evolutionary time scales the same events are described in different ways, and because of the language barrier we are failing to understand these various people groups describing the same people using words in their own language. I found things that indicate we are very stupid at interpreting: Sumerian King List - Wikipedia This is obviously a family geneology of Ham and Cush/Kish, but somehow it’s a list of kings? haha. Obviously, I don’t have time to get a degree in cuneiform.

Theory 5: It may be fairly easy to see when climate change finally stabilized after the flood - when we see lifespans recorded in the Bible much more similar to our modern ones.

Some of my thoughts right now. I have a ton of others, but I’d need to start a new thread. But I will look at what you gave me already at some point. Thanks!

Why? Why would a universe created just a few thousand years ago expect to look billions of years old?

But that has nothing to do with the age of the universe. If the universe really does look ancient, no-one is deluding themselves.

Exactly. It’s as if Adam were created not only with a navel but with 2 days of stubble, the remains of a steak dinner in his stomach, a scar from when he fell off the swing set in third grade, and memories of his 10th high school reunion.

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Did you read what I wrote about consilience in science and why it’s so important? Jeanson has done the most egregious cherry-picking of data to support one particular YEC claim while ignoring the huge amount of evidence there was no Noah’s Flood or Noah’s Ark 4500 years ago. That is not science.

Do you know it was Christian geologists who conclusively disproved a young Earth way back in the 1700’s? They went looking for evidence to validate a Noah’s Flood but instead found geologic feature after geologic feature impossible to form in a one time flood only 4500 years ago. Those geologists like most today were honest enough to know the physical evidence disproved their Young Earth / Flood hypothesis so they changed their model. That’s how all honest science works. The evidence drives the conclusion, not the other way around. If you read the introduction to Jeanson’s work he flat out says a literal Genesis interpretation must be correct and all data must be made to fit that conclusion. That is not science. It’s religious apologetics.

You can read about the early Christian geologists discoveries here.

James Hutton and Siccar Point

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I think this highlights something basic which tends to get missed. Religion doesn’t provide any method for testing facts, but science does. The best mode of proceeding is to establish what the facts appear to actually be, and THEN evaluate whether one’s theology fits them or whether one’s theology needs to be adjusted. Theology, being essentially of a philosophical nature only, can never overturn a fact, though it may shed some light, to the believer, upon ways to think about that fact.

That being said, it is plain that the first thing to acquaint oneself with are the actual views of the actual scientists in the field, not with critics of that science. One can never understand a critique of the scientific consensus without understanding that consensus, and – very important – the reasons underlying that consensus. It is not that the critics can have nothing worthwhile to say – science is all about considering other ways of interpreting data, after all. The difficulty is that it’s hard for someone who is new to a subject to recognize the difference between critiques which are ill-founded or frivolous – as creationist critiques tend to be – and ones which have potential merit.

Sometimes nonsense and science can, to the layman, sound much the same. I used to be a ham radio operator, and in connection with that I did a bit of study of transmission line theory, which is basically how electrical signals travel down wires. Transmission line theory is a pretty good example of this sort of thing. Some of the things which are accepted, standard, well-validated parts of transmission line theory sound quite absurd, but really do hold up under close scrutiny. Meanwhile, there are people who hold really quite silly points of view, whose completely non-validated views ALSO sound quite absurd. The only path for a layman to tell the difference between these two sets of absurd-sounding views is to understand the basis for the conventional view and the confirmation of that view by the data.

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Valerie, though I do not fully understand your position from your last post, some parts of it sound very encouraging…Like the above I quoted. Do not give away your faith. Think of your children. Think of eternity. Nothing that God has given us in the Scriptures is worth trading the most precious things.

The Torah was given to Moses by God…we believe God actually gave him each character to pen. The Bible revisionists here on this forum do not hold sacred, nor have regard, for these things. Continue your study, but be wise. Everything these people here will tell you is a fable, a made up story-line. You be more cunning than they. Be wiser than they. And you will do well.

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I don’t believe it is a fable or a made up storyline.

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On that, you might be interested in Tattersall’s book, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. Tattersall thinks that some of the taxa traditionally used, such as Homo erectus, are indeed bad taxa: “wastebasket” groups caused by lumping fossils together in preference to splitting them to reflect the real diversity of ancient human species. He attributes this to, among other things, Ernst Mayr’s view that human ancestry should be expected to be less “bushy” than phylogeny usually is. That said, however, there is no question at all that the various H. erectus fossils are not sapiens, and are well outside of the range of variation within sapiens. Indeed, the problem here is that they are TOO variable to all be the same species, much less the same species as we are.

What you’ll find if you scrutinize evolutionary literature is that sound and thoughtful critique of particular evolutionary views is something that goes on constantly. Science is not an echo chamber. But all critiques are not equally credible, and I think it’s very helpful to look at credible critiques of particular evolutionary hypotheses, and the way they are mounted by true experts in these fields, in order to understand how badly creationist critiques fall short. One nice example is this talk by the paleontologist Christine Janis on “arms races” between predators and prey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnB22A2wEMA

When one understands what real scientific critique looks like, it illuminates the problems with the ersatz critiques that make up creationism.

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“Some of my best friends are Ungulates”

:rofl:

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Having spent some time with Christine when she was with her horse, I can attest that this is true.

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I may not be cunning or wise, but I do believe that all truth is God’s truth.

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Really not understanding why the rocks have to be so far apart in age. All I see is one geological formation on top of another. To me that just points to one extreme event after an initial one.

Okay, I think can help you understand: Lake Varves, Volcanic Ash, and the Great Isaiah Scroll. Read the links therein in full (especially this one: A 60,000 Year Varve Record from Japan Refutes the Young-Earth Interpretation of Earth’s History – Naturalis Historia):

Looking at those lake varves, can you see why we say the earth looks older than 6,000 years? This evidence doesn’t get you to billions of years, but it seems impossible to explain as the result of 6,000 years. Would you agree that this shows the earth at least appears to be greater than 100,000 years old?

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They aren’t the sort of rocks that come out of extreme events, for the most part. And they contain clues to their ages, which cover a very long period of time. The rates at which sediments are deposited, the changes in fossil biota throughout the sequence, magnetic reversals, and radiometric dating all agree that it took a very long time.

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