It is now one month since this thread, purporting to present “Evidence for YEC”, was started.
Since then, we have seen:
A book (that has already previously been discussed, and impeached, on this thread) by an author of heavily-disputed credibility (whose work has been described as “fraudulent”) proffered as ‘evidence’. This thread of ‘evidence’ seems to have since been abandoned.
Two Youtube videos, later trimmed down to one topic contained in both these videos: “Plateaus and planes, particularly in relation to this topic of erosion rates.”
This then led to a digression into two ‘examples’, badly mis-described by YEC sourses, that were neither flat nor lacking in erosion.
We were then told that the Southern African Plateau was a “better” example. We have however, to date, been presented with neither an explanation of how this feature is inexplicable to mainstream geology, nor how a global flood explains it (let alone explains it better than mainstream geology does).
Transcripts were provided of the two videos’ ‘Plateau’ sections were provided. These turned out to be superficial and of, at best, questionable coherence, and were described by a geoscientist as “geobabble”. No attempt has been made since to defend, clarify, or explain these sections or their claims.
In stark contrast, even a quick Google Scholar search turned up multiple articles in which mainstream geology gives detailed explanations of the Southern African Plateau.
We have also been presented with numerous examples of YEC misrepresentation.
As Ron cogently pointed out a while back:
This would appear to be even more true now than when he wrote it.
Not only has this thread failed to provide any credible “Evidence for YEC”, it is by no means clear that there is any serious intention of even attempting to do so.
I must therefore question whether it is worth continuing this thread, and suggest that @moderators should seriously consider closing it.
So if I might humbly attempt a very casual summarization of what you are saying: This thread quickly became what most every “Evidence for Young Earth Creationism” thread has ever been in the history of the Internet: conspicuously void of evidence for a young earth.
After this thread, one point of comparison has become more clear.
Both worldviews seek to discredit science’s explanation of the natural world though less-than-well-developed arguments, and without an (even close to) equally coherent or consistent explanation to replace it with.
That FE tends to attempt this through conspiracy theories, and claims that science’s evidence is ‘faked’, and YEC through pervasive misrepresentation of scientific evidence, and scientists’ statements, does not appear to negate this comparison.
I want to take a moment to address the Listeners again: And specifically the (probably small) set of individuals actually interested in belief in a young earth.
Although this thread is being forced to be closed, I’m actually accepting of that, because I’ve learned a lot, and I see a better approach the topic at large (and partially because my workload starting this past week has jumped up higher than it’s been in years, plus a few family-related issues my wife and I are focused on right now). And when I have more of a capacity to engage here, I’d (eventually) like to start it back up again, with a different starting point, and different focus. I want to encourage others in their faith in the Word of God.
I have two reasons not to be discouraged right now:
FIRST: Over this past month, I’ve had to do more of my own research. What I’ve learned as given me even more confidence in belief in the Global Flood. It’s renewed my excitement in this topic. There really were a lot of good things to discuss here (and it was my intention to eventually get to them, including going back and talking about the Kangaroo Island, continental erosion, and even that dinosaur footprint). I know full well I have not done the best job of presenting evidence. That’s simply from my own limitations of presenting the evidence, and not lack of evidence.
But let me take a moment to review what you’ve seen, going back to my first two posts: First, a video testimony of a fluvial geomorphologist who came to believe in a Global Flood, before becoming a Christian, and only after resisting it for many years. All based on evidence he was seeing. What was also significant about that video was at 40:08 he talks about his non-Christian friends, saying “they accept my interpretation that a Global Flood did occur.” These are significant. And It’s amazing to me how dismissal everyone here was of that video (though not surprising).
The second was the book “Carved in Stone”, which recommend reading. You may have recalled that this book, and author were supposedly “discredited” by those in the forum. That will only serve to allow 99% of people here to dismiss it completely. What works well for me here is the 1% of you who will actually read it, and come to your own conclusion. I’m believing there are those of you out there like me who really want to know what is true, and not what is popular.
And after those two sources, it should inspire you to go do more of your own research, and find out just how much evidence there is of the Global Flood. I’ve said this before, after seeing it all, I just can’t look at the world other than that was globally flooded. I may have failed to present it well enough in this thread, and the naturalists sure look like they’ve won against my efforts. But they didn’t do anything to discourage my beliefs.
SECOND: I’ve seen just how much the naturalists want to fight against it, and in ways that I don’t believe are the most genuine. It has become evident to me that they certainly do not want you believing in a Global Flood, and they will do a lot to try and discourage it (“nothing to see here”). That’s the conclusion I’ve come to, and it doesn’t matter to me if they agree with that. And I trust that there are those of you out there who see it too.
It breaks my heart to see that happening here, and contributes to why I say that I will not be discouraged, and will not stop sharing with others in this place about the great world-view I have discovered, and my faith in God’s Word.
I consider this thread a water-mark. A starting place for me. These two reasons I’ve given above, and the few of you out there who really want to hear more, are why I will not give up on this topic. I’m not done here…
To the supposed Listeners: notice how @jeffb has again spent all his time handwaving vaguely in the direction of what he claims is evidence without ever engaging in the least with that evidence. Is it that he personally doesn’t have the expertise? Or is it that he knows that his evidence won’t stand up to investigation? Hard to tell.
The entire screed would be almost identical if you changed the subject to anti-vaxism, or Q-anon, or, recalling the original impetus, to flat-earthism. Does that tell you anything? I think it does.
Clearly, since you haven’t yet begun. Please try to engage with some evidence. A convincing presentation would engage directly with the strongest evidence presumed by scientists to contradict your claims. That’s a difficult task. Since almost everything is incompatible with your understanding of the Genesis story, I really don’t know where you could start. The fossil succession? Radiometric dating? Phylogeny? The size of the visible universe? You have a lot of work to do, and you really should begin at some point.
You claim you “really want to know what is true,” but you’re fooling only yourself. You’re really just looking for excuses to retain your existing beliefs.
You started this thread talking about providing evidence (but not actually providing any), and pointing people at a video and a book.
200 posts later you’re still talking about providing evidence, you still haven’t provided any evidence, and you’re still touting the same video and the same book.
If you had anything else to offer, you wouldn’t be repeating yourself. So while you might not think you’re done here, you definitely are, because no-one is listening any more.
Nothing is being forced, we can keep it open if you really want (or you can blame me for closing it), but closing the topic seems to be the kindest way to bring this to a conclusion.
And of course you may start a new topic if you like.
I want to encourage others in their faith in the Word of God.
Have you considered that arguing against the Laws of Physics might not be the best way to go about that? It makes for good “signaling”, showing others which side you are on, but it precludes acceptance from anyone who understands that just isn’t how the world works. There are other ways to encourage faith, and IMO better ways because they do not set Christians against each other. YEC beliefs depend on science being the opposition, which is a false dilemma, at best. Even if you are right, you can only stand to gain from a better understanding of the scientific arguments.
I am a Christian, and this thread has done nothing to encourage my faith in the Word of God. It’s only increased my disdain for those – not necessarily you, but certainly those from whom you get your arguments – who massage and fudge the data to support their interpretation of the Bible. This does nothing to glorify God, and even turns people away from the church.
If I want to deceive you, I would not start with I’ve always believed this. I would say that I was a skeptic, opposed to the idea, but against every fiber of my being the blinders came off when I was convinced by overwhelming evidence that was prior hidden to me.
Sometimes, people change their mind for whatever reasons, but often enough, it is fabrication, exaggeration, and extraneous detail to lend credibility, for some goal not rooted in objectivity. I’m not making an accusation here, I am saying the Damascus Road story does not and should not count as evidence. But you have avoided discussion of evidence.
For what it is worth though, I once accepted a literal global flood, and nearly suffered a nervous breakdown when I tried to reconcile the story with reality. I was not, as you say a naturalist, and I desperately wanted to convince myself the flood was true.
Why are you so convinced by the video? Nearly all geologists including fluvial geomorphologists, who work with the same data, accept an ancient Earth, would be insistent that their own firsthand work demonstrates geological time, and could tell you exactly why that is the case. There is no evidence for a global flood to resist. Instead, earth science in all its sub-specialties yields a coherent picture of continuity, as well as authentic disruptions such as the asteroid impact, extending back to the nascent planet.
Jeff, here is the thing. We know the earth is old, but that barely warrants a mention. The thing is we have a pretty robust and detailed understanding of what happened over that expanse of time. We know the approximate climate, ecology, magnetic field, which prevailed a million years ago. The history of atmospheric composition, the temperature of the oceans, the drift of tectonic plates, have been investigated against millions and billions of years. Nobody cares about proving such an established fact that the earth is old; they are interested in what happened over that time, and those happenings did not include a global deluge.
Actual research would have shown that Kangaroo Island was rather different from the claims made about it. Compare the evidence produced in this thread with the evidence produced by Joel Duff in his series on the Dead Sea. Which is only a tiny fraction of the evidence for an old Earth. There’s just no comparison.
Geology reveals a long and complex history. You can see it just be looking at the rocks. Layers are deposited, lithified, deformed, eroded and new layers deposited on top. That doesn’t happen in a few thousand years.
[I have been directed to avoid use of the second person in this post, because it is too “accusatory”. If it sounds a bit distorted/artificial in its tone, this is why.]
Yes Jeff – because of a failure to even attempt to present any credible “evidence for YEC”.
Instead, we have had attempts to drag us into every conceivable rabbit-hole other than this evidence. That, in and of itself, is reason enough to put this zombie-thread out of its misery.
There is no more reason to accept interpretations of the Bible that take it as speaking of a Young Earth, than interpretations of it that take it as speaking of a Flat Earth.
And yet we have a failure over that same month to give any intimation of why anybody should share such “confidence” – leading to a reasonable conclusion that such “confidence” is misplaced.
Have you finally realised that the uplands of Kangaroo Island are neither flat nor uneroded? Have you even looked at a topographical map of Kangaroo Island yet?
That is a fairly profound understatement.
Then these “limitations” would appear to have been shared by every YEC from George McCready Price onwards – as they share this thread’s inability to present credible evidence.
Transcripts of this fluvial geomorphologist, talking on Jeff’s chosen topic of plateaus (a topic that, as far as I can ascertain, this fluvial geomorphologist has never researched) in all his less-than-coherent glory can be found here and here.
Here is a transcript of that section.
I think in my case, traveling around the world and then also not looking at just one type of landform, but looking at many types of landform. Then also meeting and interacting with paleontologists and biologists and so on, and seeing they face the same problems that I faced. - Yes. - In that the evidence globally was not matching what we were taught as a process. And I say that because surprisingly, a number of my non-Christian friends who travel with me around the world say they see the same evidence that I saw and they see that there’s a possible interpretation, but as non-Christians, they’re not going to accept it at this stage. But it’s interesting, they accept my interpretation that a global flood did occur. It’s a journey we all have to go on and a lot of people don’t have the opportunity to see what I’ve seen, meet whom I’ve met, explore where I’ve explored. - Yeah, you had that wider view and you also explained to me that as in the middle of that 30 year journey, satellite imagery was becoming more available and you had a unique opportunity to look at that and see that that showed large scale features on the earth as well. Could you tell us a bit about that? - Correct, yes. When Landset images and SLAR images and others became available, it did change the way we thought. And it was an interesting journey because you couldn’t even get those images necessarily on computer in the early days. You got 'em as as print copies of Landset images of parts of the planet. And particularly when I was in Finland, we actually purchased, well that team purchased all the images for the Amazon where you could look at the Amazon on hard copy Landset images. You get a very different view, a very different view because why? You can see landscapes you couldn’t see before. You could see scales you could never see before. And so that helped us then to help me particularly to match landscape to landscape, region to region, feature to feature and so on. So the moment we started to get access to those sort of images, it was wonderful. - So you were describing to me, you saw something that really surprised you when you first looked at some of these Landset images. And it was, instead of the river basin draining in, you saw what looked like to be a huge delta, but you could only, but 'cause it was covered by the Amazon rainforest, you couldn’t, you’re telling me you couldn’t even see it via aerial photography. It had to be the satellite photography.
What I see is a complete failure to state how the “evidence globally was not matching what we were taught as a process”.
And I would ask who claims that “the Amazon rainforest” doesn’t have “a huge delta” when Wikipedia has a page on it? As this appears to be the only claimed what of “evidence globally was not matching what we were taught as a process”, it is in fact hard to see anything here. “Nothing To See Here” would appear to be more of a straight-line than a punch-line in this thread. If there are fireworks and explosions in this topic, Jeff and Neller have completely failed to point them out.
This whole claim would appear to be “not properly filled out or developed” – i.e. vacuous.
As such, I make no apology for being ‘dismissive’ of it.
There is no “supposedly” about it. The author was caught by this very thread, making a blatantly false claim that was quoted with approval on this thread:
I hate to disabuse this belief, but I don’t care about people believing in YEC, Flat Earth, alien abductions, sightings of Elvis, or any other of the daft things that components of humanity has convinced themselves of. There is far, far, far too many of them, and life is far, far, far too short to care.
I do care about YECs misrepresenting science in a futile attempt to buttress these beliefs – especially when they do so right in front of me – as happened on this thread.
I would also like to address them.
Look at what the YEC side has done throughout this thread.
Has the YEC side of this thread been careful or careless in fact-checking the claims presented here?
Has the YEC side of this thread fairly represented opposing viewpoints, or has it misrepresented them (e.g. by quoting out of context)?
Has the YEC side of this thread attempted to present themselves as the victim in this thread’s closure, or accepted responsibility for the failure to actually deliver on this thread’s stated topic – even when given a whole month in which to do so.
To be “done” one would first have had to have started something.
Just look at this example (a picture I took last summer).
Even without knowing the details (such as lithologies and fossil content etc.) or the wider setting, isn’t it clear that an awful lot must have happened to the rocks in this picture to make this outcrop look as it is? Starting with their deposition, then their lithification, deformation, erosion, re-burial, deposition again, uplift and erosion… how could all that possibly have happened in just a few thousand years?
I’d be curious to know exactly what this research entails.
At the risk of being presumptuous (and cynical), my general experience with young Earth creationists is that “research” often consists of just consuming creationist sources, typically from authoritarian figures.
There’s certainly no shortage of creationist material out there for people seeking validation of a creationist worldview. But if that’s what you are consuming, it’s less about research and more just confirmation bias.
This seems to be the case in this thread, where as others have mentioned, the opening post isn’t about specific evidence, but rather references to authoritarian sources (interview, book).
I feel like this is going into conspiracy territory by prescribing motivations on those who disagree with a global flood, as opposed to dealing with objections at face value.
One way of addressing this is to step back from the confines of an internet message board, and look at this from a global perspective.
If creationists are right and conventional “old Earth” geology is wrong, who would be interested in that? A prime audience would be the trillion dollar oil & gas industry (about $7 trillion USD). This is an industry that would benefit from the best understanding of geology possible.
Right now, they do geological modelling based on “old Earth” geology, conventional stratigraphic dating, paleoclimate data, etc. If YECs are really correct and modern geology is really that wrong, then there should be a huge opportunity for changing geological modelling in the oil & gas industries, which should in principal give any such company to adopt YECism a competitive advantage.
And yet… the oil & gas industry has no interest in YEC geology. Instead, YEC geology is confined to religious ministries, which themselves are largely confined to the U.S. and specifically the Bible Belt.
Looking at things from that perspective, the idea that YEC and the global flood is supported by evidence independent of religious views just doesn’t pass the sniff test. It’s very obviously just a religious worldview.
If you’re happy with that worldview, you’re certainly welcome to it. But I don’t think you’ve really thought about the basis for that worldview in a particularly objective manner.
Jeff, on this point I entirely agree with you—if you mean “do more of your own research” entails consulting both the YEC literature and the non-YEC literature. If anyone stays within the YEC echo chamber for their “own research”, they won’t learn much about the evidence.
I agree with that also. I want everyone to find out just how much evidence there is of “the Global Flood.” There is zero. And that is why you were unable to present any compelling evidence—because nobody could. It doesn’t exist.
I’ve listened to a lot of flat-earth interviews and debates recently and I always notice a similar expression which I will paraphrase as: “I know I haven’t explained the evidence for a flat-earth all that well. But that doesn’t make it any less compelling. And the more I study the flat-earth evidence, the more convinced I am.” And some of those people also say things like: “But above all I KNOW the flat-earth perspective is true because my Bible tells me so.” Interesting. You can find many examples of this, such as within this video:
There is also what is well expressed in the published guidelines for the “peer-reviewed” journal published by Answers in Genesis: All of the papers and research MUST comply with Ken Ham’s particular interpretation of the Bible and YEC-dom or else the paper won’t be published. That’s not science. And it doesn’t provide compelling evidence.
Young Earth Creationism is not based upon science and it’s not even based upon the Bible. While Christians of times past certainly assumed the earth was young, Young Earth Creationism based upon “creation science” is a very recent development. It is a particular hermeneutical position.
I’ve always appreciated the honesty of Kurt Wise. He has made clear that the volume of evidence for an old earth doesn’t matter to him. He simply believes that the Bible requires him to believe in a young earth. I can understand that position (even if I disagree with it as a Bible-affirming Christ-follower who is hardly a “naturalist.”) [Of course, I assume your use of the word “naturalist” was short for “philosophical naturalist.”]
In the same way, nobody cares any more about showing that evolution is real; they are interested in improving our understanding of the mechanisms underlying evolution.
I suspect that it entailed listening to/reading hearsay in the absence of evidence, then nodding sagely in agreement without examining a single datum.
Yup. And if they were correct about biology, fundamentalist Christian schools would have active research (producing new data) and graduate programs that make far more and more important contributions to human medicine than those from those of us who see biology as a product of evolution.
Talk Origins has recently posted a link to an article with some examples:
Eg:
As we began research for our book, Righting America at the Creation Museum, we assumed that we would find lots of Bible at the museum. And in one sense, there is indeed some Bible, or better, there are many little snippets of Bible. But as we looked closely at the museum’s ubiquitous placards – and here we had the assistance of a very bright doctoral student – we discovered an inconsistent use of translations, extraordinarily creative editing of biblical passages, a lack of ellipses to indicate where text (sometimes whole verses) had been removed from a passage, and the failure to provide relevant context for the passages that are displayed
