He seems to be going down a list of 20 year old Creationist talking points, ones most other YECs have long recognized as rebutted. I suppose there’s always some poor soul who doesn’t get the word. 
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When I was still part of the Young Earth Creationist community, this problem used to drive me nuts. Probably the most famous example was Duane Gish. He would occasionally even admit in a public Q&A that his published claims about the bombardier beetle’s “explosive spray” were false and therefore a terrible “creation science” claim—and he’d even promise to correct them in the next edition of his book—but then at his next creation conference on the following weekend, he would return to his standard script and repeat the nonsense.
I came to realize that a lot of the Young Earth Creationist arguments I grew up with were like beloved tribal legends which simply could not be abandoned. Why couldn’t they be abandoned? I think the reasons included (1) many of them were very convincing to layperson audiences, and (2) the leaders assumed that any admission of error would threaten the credibility of the movement. (3) So many of those arguments sounded so very sciency! (Yes, I saw the irony. The speakers kept claiming that science was all wrong—and yet they wanted to sound very scientific because they knew that was there best shot at credibility. They realized that the public actually trusts science as very authoritative.)
I eventually began to wonder if gas-lighting was involved as well.
Here again, these are very human traits that can afflict any of us when we aren’t careful. We have a similar problem with traditional but very erroneous exegetical fallacies which persist despite being discredited long ago. While evangelical scholars have abandoned them, popular preachers and radio/TV evangelists and teachers have not. (Example: Who has not heard the claim that AGAPAO love is unique to Christians even though that is the verb used to describe the rape of Tamar by Absalom’s half-brother? I used to carefully explain this to some pastor and then hear him use the same erroneous AGAPAO love claim a year or two later. It was his only good “I’m a Greek exegete also!” sermon.)
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That’s not a double-standard. I consider astrology to be pseudoscience—because it is. That doesn’t make me hypocritical or guilty of a double-standard when I call them dogmatic and hopelessly superstitious for rejecting the conclusions of physics and astronomers who tell them that the stars and planets do not dictate or guide our fates.
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The irony is that he puts the words of man far above any Word of God in the context of nature.
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I don’t see one.
It’s not about disagreement per se. It’s about pretending that science is not about testing predictions of hypotheses, but instead it can only be done (almost entirely rhetorically) retrospectively.
Which is precisely what you are doing here.
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If this thread is dying down—or even if it’s not—perhaps @PDPrice would like to post on new threads what he considers to be the very best young earth arguments. We get a lot of visitors on these forums so a review of the classics is a valuable public service. (And for me it is kind of nostalgic.)
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I’m just one person with limited time to spend, so I am not sure I have a desire to start a take-all-comers free for all match against pretty much everybody here. We’ll see, I’m more likely to post something when I am trying to hammer out some of my ideas and see what sorts of responses I get.
And for the record, you’re not an example of the type of individual I am going to spend much time on in any case. You’ve already accused creation scientists of manipulating data intentionally and even of gaslighting, so you’re obviously emotionally biased against YECs to a rather extreme degree.
Yes, and it would be helpful if @PDPrice provided specific titles to help all of us to remain focused.
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I would like to mention that there is a fundamental problem with a strategy that includes embracing outliers. Look at the three examples explored in just these recent threads.
- 100 experiments resulting in a positive outcome with one resulting in a negative.
- Trillions of “old things” fossilized with a handful (potentially) preserved.
- Thousands of pieces of art containing known and living animals with a few obscure examples that resemble dinosaurs (for instance.)
Now consider the thousands of other examples of evidence types. The point being that the sum of the evidence that one presents is compounded. Strong evidence in each category leads to strong conclusions. Weak evidence in each category leads to weak conclusions.
So, if one is engaged in calling a single outlier the norm, that’s one thing. But, to do so again and again and again and again detracts from the plausibility of the theory. Every evidentiary explanation in the YEC realm is an outlier. It’s simple enough for supporters to insist that a single explanation is worthy of consideration, but only on its own. When every dimension of every layer of evidence is unlikely, the sum of that evidence is completely unbelievable.
Consider any other area of discussion where this same situation applies. Are there any wherein a reasonable person would side with the outliers? I can’t think of any examples.
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This ain’t gaslighting:
The multiple independent clocks that God has built into nature check each other’s calibration and validate each other.
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Just to clarify what is meant by the word “pseudoscience”:
Pseudoscience is anything that claims to be science but that does not play by the rules of science.
The whole point that everyone has been making to you is that science has rules. Rules that are concerned first and foremost with basic honesty, factual accuracy, technical rigour and quality control, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with “secularism” or “compromise” or “unbelief” or “disagreeing with people” or “dogmatism” or “presuppositions.” Rules which, in some contexts, if you didn’t follow them, you would kill people.
This is the point that everybody has been trying to make. They have been explaining to you what the rules are, and exactly how and why young-earth claims simply do not stick to the rules. And since they do not stick to the rules, the word “pseudoscience” is most definitely an appropriate description of them.
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I don’t think I’ve heard your explanation for the clear depiction of a Shunosaurus I demonstrated earlier. You want to downplay what you are calling ‘outliers’, but facts are facts. Simply saying “why don’t we see more dinosaur depictions?” (probably because they were very rare even then!) does nothing to get rid of the need of an explanation for what we DO have.
If by ‘rules’ you mean disallowing the belief in the supernatural and of the Bible’s history, from the outset (a priori), then yeah. If you want to define the terms to suit yourself go right ahead. It’s like Richard Lewontin said:
" It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."
Richard Lewontin, Billions and billions of demons (review of The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997), The New York Review , p. 31, 9 January 1997.
No, I mean the basic rules and principles of mathematics and measurement.
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Ok, then you’re just propagating a dishonest caricature with no basis in reality. YEC scientists certainly don’t deny principles of mathematics or measurement.
James said what type of rules he meant:
Rules that are concerned first and foremost with basic honesty, factual accuracy, technical rigour and quality control, and that have nothing whatsoever to do with “secularism” or “compromise” or “unbelief” or “disagreeing with people” or “dogmatism” or “presuppositions.”*
and you deleted that from your reply and pretended he meant the exact opposite. Yet you have the nerve to claim that James is engaged in dishonest caricature.
That’s the kind of deliberate, malicious, obvious and completely unnecessary dishonesty that forms such a major part of the YEC advocate ‘debate’ technique and leads to rejection, derision and disgust.
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Anything can be included in science if it is empirical and testable. The problem with YEC is that it is notoriously dogmatic. Here are two questions that I often ask YEC’s. Feel free to answer them if you want.
What features would a geologic formation need in order to falsify a young earth or a recent global flood?
What features would a fossil need to have in order to be transitional between modern humans and a common ancestor shared with chimps?
Do I need to give you some examples?
- Very little sediment on the sea floor
The calculations are invalid: riverine sediment ends up on the continental shelf, while the existing deposits being measured were those on the deep ocean floor. - Bent rock layers that are not fractured
This claim is blatantly untrue, as can be seen by comparing the example given to higher-quality photographs of the same rock formation both by USGS and by Answers in Genesis themselves. Bent rock layers are fractured. - Soft tissue in dinosaur fossils
While these findings are surprising, they do not contradict anything that we know about how long soft tissue can last, and in any case they are too rare and too badly degraded to be consistent with a young earth. Furthermore, many YEC accounts exaggerate the state of preservation of what was found. - The faint young sun paradox
Although it does suggest fine tuning, this says nothing about the age of the earth. - Earth’s magnetic field is rapidly decaying
This is based on an invalid extrapolation that is contradicted not only by the data, but also by both young-earth and old-earth models of how the Earth’s magnetic field works. - Too much helium in radioactive rocks
This is a very complex (and therefore error-prone) claim that is compromised by numerous serious errors including sloppy experimental technique, invalid assumptions, fudged data, misidentified rock samples, and a refusal to submit to meaningful peer review. - Carbon-14 in fossils, coals and diamonds
The measured carbon-14 levels are consistent with known, measured, and well-studied contamination mechanisms. - Short-lived comets
This denies that the Oort Cloud exists, based on an unrealistic assumption that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It also disregards calculations of the historic orbits of known comets showing them to have been slingshotted closer to the sun by planets such as Jupiter. - Very little salt in the sea
This is based on outdated and cherry-picked data, poorly known quantities with huge error bars, and a naive extrapolation of rates that can not realistically be expected to have been the same in the past as they are today. The most up to date research indicates that the amount of salt in the sea is approximately in a state of equilibrium, and that it therefore tells us nothing about the age of the earth. - DNA in ancient bacteria
This is based on a single disputed study. It has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that the salt deposits and the bacteria themselves were the same age, nor that the salt crystals were undisturbed since their original formation.
If these top ten young-earth shenanigans aren’t “denying principles of mathematics and measurement,” then quite frankly I don’t know what is.
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Yes, they do.