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

Thank you. I’m quite overwhelmed here. But the info is what I was looking for. I figure others would guide me a little better on the basic assumptions of the science. For now, I like that this is separate from social media. I’m already in too many groups :slight_smile:

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Thank you. I’d be very interested to see read it, especially if there’s one article that explains all.

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Question here - I just read the first few pages and already have a fundamental question. Lol, I had to look back at a period table. It said that atomic weights continue to change. I looked up atomic weights. It said they are a ratio of mass to carbon-12. Would a change in atomic weights of the elements in question, or of carbon affect radiometric dating? I probably need to get farther and see the mathematical formula. I have a mathematical mind but not a scientific one. I’m not sure the question I’m asking even makes sense, but I’m still asking in hopes someone can help me.

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They wouldn’t. I suppose instead, it’d be more reasonable the other way around. Plate tectonics - earthquakes, volcanoes, ocean level effects would cause climate change. As I said, I’m not a scientific mind. Science has only been an interest in the last 5-10 years. I paid no attention in school and liked all other subjects better. Oops. Forgive my misstatements.

Ah, but you have the beginning of a scientific mind Valerie. You have already exhibited that.

There are many definitions of science to be found, and no one definition recognized by all. But to me, science is a systematic and disciplined approach to resolving curiosity. A curious mind is not satisfied with untested assumptions about nature, and when one question is answered, another is generally around the corner. Why is that? How did this happen? Then what? Now science is much more that just undirected curiosity, but that is the impetus.

Scientific understanding can be hard won. There is work involved to digest what generations of other curious individuals, namely scientists, have broadly discovered about our world. Unlike the impression that many Christians have, scientists generally don’t just make stuff up. They are human like the rest of us and fallible, but try very hard to get things right and the track record is very good for eventually purging out misinformation and making real progress in knowledge. The system works.

Even though the route to becoming a recognized researcher is very difficult, and scientists will always know far more about their specialty than a lay person, it is important to be able to learn from specialists while still evaluating the quality of that information. Ultimately, we are all responsible for our own minds. It is a cop out to outsource our understanding of the world. So learn from others, but integrate that into your own understanding.

Start with what you yourself can see with your own eyes, and ask how that fits in with what is already known. Why are mountains where they are? Why are the animals is Australia different from ones found in Africa? If at a museum, what kind of world did dinosaurs live in, what plants did they eat, how did they defend themselves? What was the ecology? In the night sky, try to find Andromeda with your naked eye. Notice that the star Betelgeuse is notably red, what do scientist think that means? Look at astronomy pictures from Hubble and think of ways the various galaxies interacted and became shaped as they are.

You are an English major. Nature can be seen as a pastoral snapshot in time, a detailed description of a given setting at a given moment. Part of science is in that detailed description. But nature also has a plot, secrets from the past and unexpected turns to the future. It is in this dynamic aspect that the real excitement is to be found, where did it come from, what is happening now? If you follow your curiosity, learn from others who are just as inquisitive as yourself, remain open to personal discovery and growth, and ask lots of questions and really think for yourself, you will find that scientific side to yourself.

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OK. First tell me what you know about radiocarbon (C14) dating. You need to understand the basic principles of how the method works before I begin explaining calibration. Here is a quick tutorial. Look it over and ask questions if you need further explanation.

How Carbon-14 Dating Works

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Valerie, if you are coming to these ideas on your own that is quite impressive. I suggest you check out John Baumgardner’s flood model called Catastrophic Plate Tectonics. Here’s Baumgardner explaining it in person.

I’ve also done a shorter video giving a hopefully easier to understand explanation. However, I made a few mistakes. The core of the earth is considered to be liquid while the mantle is solid. I also said the water jets would occur at the subduction zones instead of the rifting zones. In other words they would occur where the plates are separating not smashing into each other. But otherwise it’s I think a decent explanation that’s short.

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Be warned that Baumgardner’s idea is rank pseudoscience.

Actually, only the outer core is liquid, while the inner core is solid. The mantle is mostly solid, but the upper mantle has pockets of melt.

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Who said this: “Again, you need to do more than just say “this isn’t true”. You have to explain exactly what part of it isn’t true and why”?

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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