Is Young Earth Creationism a good bet?

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DanieltheDragon
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Is Young Earth Creationism a good bet?

Post #1

Post by DanieltheDragon »

Is Young Earth Creationism a good bet?


The subject of much debate in the forum of public discourse centers around the validity of creationism. The proponents seek validation in the scientific communities and the detractors say it has no place. However, it may seem that things are not so simple. With religious implications involved within YEC emotions can quickly get involved on both sides of the debate.

In this discussion we are not addressing evolution big bang or abiogenesis. We are simply discussing the merits of YEC itself and should it be considered as a valid alternative to the current scientific consensus.

In other words is it a good bet? A good bet is something that you can be sure of, something you could bet your life savings on. So we will address the evidence and see if YEC is such a compelling case that it can be considered a good bet.



The terms in which we have agreed upon are simple:

1. 6 rounds

a.)Introductions
b.)Reasons for believing in an old or young earth.
c.)Fossil Record
d.)Age of the Solar system
e.)Age of the Universe
f.) Closing statements

2. No particular weight given to consensus, but any evidence used must reach a level of reproducibility.

3. Each debate round will leave room for at least 1 rebuttal per claim.

4. This is a slightly informal debate. While there is a structure to guide the debate leeway and flexibility will be given to promote a civil and fruitful discussion.

5.) Stcordova will get the initial post in each round and I will get the last post.

6.) There is no set limit to posts but at any point either debater can simply declare the debate shall end and closing statements will be made.
Last edited by DanieltheDragon on Mon Sep 15, 2014 1:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.

DanieltheDragon
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Re: Is Young Earth Creationism a good bet?

Post #2

Post by DanieltheDragon »

[Replying to post 1 by DanieltheDragon]

___________________________________________


ROUND 1

___________________________________________

stcordova
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Post #3

Post by stcordova »

ROUND 1: INTRODUCTIONS

I'd like to thank DanielTheDragon for suggesting this debate. It is my hope this dialogue will be to our mutual benefit and that readers on both sides of the question will come away with a better appreciation for the issues raised and their relevance to people's lives.

I will argue that YEC (Young Earth Creation) is a good bet. But first let me introduce myself.

I was an raised in a Roman Catholic home and accepted evolution as true since that's what I was taught in public school. During my senior year in high school, I became an Old Earth Creationist (OEC) upon learning of the complexity of life and the origin of life problem. Shortly thereafter, I joined the Presbyterian Church of America. But I eventually began to have nagging doubts about the Bible and Christianity and became an agnostic for a brief season.

As an agnostic, about 11 years ago, the only truth I was sure of was that my father was terminally ill, that when I prayed, I never heard the voice of God as I hear the voice of humans interacting with me. Dad died despite my many prayers. God didn't seem very real. The only reality for me was a material world that seemed horribly indifferent to me and a God that was so invisible that it was easy to conclude He was just a wishful concept, not a real person concerned with my sorrows and needs.

Added to that, occasionally I had the distasteful experience of listening to preachers scream at me from the pulpit. They screamed that I wasn't grateful enough for all the good God had done for me. Yet the only thing that seemed real was my broken heart. It was easy to think, if there was a God who was all powerful and loved me, he'd intervene to help my loved ones. Preachers screaming from the pulpit “God loves you� struck me more like a tantrum by someone who was upset that people didn't take their message seriously. They acted like they were scolding children rather trying to inspire adults with faith and trust. It didn't convey to me that the preacher comprehended human experience, needs, and hurts.

Added to that, there were missionaries in my local church like (the now famous) Heather Mercer who were risking their lives for the Christian faith. Belief in God was no longer an intellectual question, but a question of life and death for my friends. If the Christian faith were false, on a personal level, I decided I should do what I could do to discourage people like Heather from throwing their lives away for a lie. There was another girl in my Bible study who wanted to follow in Heather's footsteps. I lost sleep at night wondering if my endorsement of the Christian faith was helping send people like her to their doom – all for a lie. In essence, was Christianity a good bet for someone's life? Would I wager the life of someone I loved over the question?

I found it loathsome that many times when I asked others whether Jesus was real, I'd get the response, “It says so right here in the Bible, that's why it's true.� I was mortified that circular reasoning and avoidance of hard questions was the norm for dealing with tough questions.

After one Bible study when I asked the members to pray for my doubts, I recall someone at my Bible study chiding me and saying, “Why don't you just believe.� I wanted to respond, “Well, why don't I just believe I have a billion dollars in my bank account? Is this all the evidence and justification we have to send my missionary friends to their death, for me and others to devote their life to something?�

During that time, I found some solace in the company of atheists, agnostics and skeptics because of their critical thinking and questioning. They were bold enough to articulate my frustrations with the Evangelical experience. When I could not bring myself to say certain things, they'd say it for me. The church experience had many good things, but there was a lot of bad, and it was almost too much for me to take, and I nearly left forever.

My crisis of faith happened after I competed my 3rd science degree. I had completed a BS in Math with a minor in Physics, a BS in Electrical Engineering with a minor in Music, and a BS in Computer Science. Science and engineering were working miracles, and it was the empirical methods and critical thinking in these disciplines that I found appealing. These were qualities I found so absent in my Evangelical experience. I found myself on Sunday morning being preached at and shouted at, not being persuaded.

Nevertheless, all the science in the world could not give me eternal salvation from the pains of life, so I clung to the possibility the gospels were true. It was at that point I began my quest and concluded: life is the product of Intelligent Design, life on Earth is recent and consistent with the genealogy of Christ, Noah's flood is a better explanation for the paleontological record rather than millions of years of time, and Young Earth Creation is a good bet scientifically and spiritually.

I've also come to believe, the reason the YEC controversy is so hard to resolve is that it is by God's design. Proverbs 25:2 “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, the glory of Kings is to search out a matter.� God may have hidden evidence but God also intended that the hidden evidence one day be discovered. And now it is apparent through the methods of science, this evidence will be finally uncovered.

I believe also the reason for human suffering is explained by 2 Cor 4:17, that the present awfulness is necessary for conveying the value of the new Heaven and Earth. It is a strange property of reality that something good is more valuable because of the possibility of evil.

If YEC is true, that would mean the entire universe with all its laws and history and grandeur attest to the truthfulness of the genealogy of Christ as laid out in the gospels. Even if the Earth is old, but life recent (along with Noah's flood), that would also be supportive of the gospels.

Because of the possibility of YEC and what it might entail, I got even more obsessed with the YEC case. As a result, I entered graduate school to learn more physics and completed a Master of Science in Applied Physics at Johns Hopkins University. The Young Earth Creationist Ben Carson was even scheduled to speak at my graduation!

I studied Astrophysics, General Relativity, Cosmology and whatever I could crawl through. Outside of my formal degree program, I studied population genetics and molecular biology, and am now preparing for a PhD program in molecular biophysics to help me in my continuing quest.

A not-so-flattering fact is that I was listed in the credits of Documentary Holy Rollers, the story of Christian gamblers who took the casinos for 3.5 million dollars by making good bets. I paid a little bit of my school tuition by my casino income. ;) I learned the principles of making good bets in an environment of uncertainties like the casinos and in the financial markets. In a similar vein, in the exchange of ideas in this thread, I hope to highlight the reasons I think YEC is a good bet.

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Post #4

Post by DanieltheDragon »

I enjoy a certain level of privacy so I will keep my introduction short and sweet.


I grew up in the south in a Baptist/Methodist family. There are 2 preachers in my family 4 missionaries and a partridge in a pear tree. I largely wanted to follow this tradition but was draw more to my artistic rather than vocal strengths. Study of the bible was the cause for my loss of faith. I went a private christian school so my background and education in the sciences was rather stunted. After graduating with a BFA I have since discovered an inner passion for the sciences and consider myself fairly well rounded in many areas within the sciences. As a stay at home dad I have dedicated a significant amount of my free time going back to school studying various sciences my recent foray has been in psychology.

I don't view YEC as a viable bet. I am largely unaware of any scientific evidence that points to a young earth. If a young earth can be demonstrated I would be glad to consider it. Also I don't believe a young earth necessitates a god of any kind it would merely stipulate that the earth is young. So I don't see how a young earth would negate my atheistic beliefs. Afterall the universe was young at some point right?

Also my user name is based off the bible if you can find the bible story it is lifted from I will gift you 2000 coins
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stcordova
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Post #5

Post by stcordova »

ROUND 2

REASONS FOR BELIEVING IN AN OLD OR YOUNG EARTH

Humans come and go, but the grandeur of the Earth and the Universe remain. It is this apparent changelessness that makes it easy to think the Earth and Universe are either eternal or at least very very old. Human intuition says the Earth is old, but what if human intuition is wrong?

If Earth appeared recently this would also imply it appeared through a miraculous process. But miracles are rare to non-existent in most people’s ever day experience. We seem trapped in a world of unchanging and eternal physical laws. Given these perceptions, most people, myself included (once upon a time), would naturally suppose the Earth is very old.

But as Huxley said, the tragedy of science is that ugly facts can destroy an otherwise beautiful intuition. What are the ugly facts? Are these facts inconvenient enough to make us suspect our natural intuition is completely wrong?

In Darwin’s time, there were lots of people who thought the universe was eternal. But this naïve view was shattered after the formulation of the laws of thermodynamics. Thermodynamics tells us the stars cannot burn forever, hence the universe could not be eternal, but had a beginning. It further implied the laws of physics as we know them are neither eternal nor immutable. Thus the door to the miraculous began to open, and a miracle at universal scale. The laws of physics themselves seemed constructed to hint that miracles are possible.

Because of thermodynamics and the Big Bang theory, the mainstream went from believing an eternal universe to one that is only 13 billion years old. But now, dare we suppose the time frame is even more outrageously small, on the order of several thousand years for the Earth? For this to be possible we must examine first whether a miraculous creation of the Earth is indicated by the evidence.

A major fact confronting the evolutionary model of the Earth and Solar System is the substantially different chemistries and compositions of the planets in the Solar System. If the Solar System evolved from the space dust, the mathematical expectation is Earth should have a much more similar chemistry to other objects in the Solar System. But this is obviously not true. The different chemistries of each of the Solar System planets accords better with a miraculous special creation. This is no minor point, but it is hard to convey the force of the problem in the short space of this debate. I leave it for the readers to investigate on their own. I trust, on careful examination of the physical facts, it will become painfully obvious gravity acting on space dust won't be a believable explanation for the different chemicals, moon orbits, axis tilts and planetary rotations in the Solar System. It is evident the Solar System was designed to resist evolutionary interpretations and testify of special creation.

Image

Beyond evidence the Solar System was specially created, what evidence is there that the Earth was created? If the Earth had been evolved from a molten state of particle bombardment, then Archimedes principle would require of denser substances sinking toward center and less dense substances rising toward the surface. But this is not the case. Instead we find gold (70% denser than lead) on the surface of the Earth. What we would expect due to Archimedes principle is a layer cake of lighter and lighter minerals stacked on top of each other, but we do not.

In addition to that, the radio isotopes are concentrated in the thin continental crust, and almost absent in the mantle and core and sea floor. And why should a very special kind of water end up on the Earth, not found elsewhere in the Solar System? Special creation of the Earth versus a molten evolution from space dust is more consistent with the facts.

If evidence favors a miraculous special creation of the Earth, then this opens the door to the possibility for affixing its age to a more recent time frame. We only need to find physical systems that can act as forensic clocks to help us affix an age for the Earth.

A major reason for believing an Old Earth is the presence of the long term (more than 700 million year half-life) radioisotopes and the absence of intermediate term (less than 700 million years, more than 80 million year half-life) radioisotopes. But the assumption of long term radioisotopes being reliable clocks leads to contradiction that they cannot be reliable clocks without some reconception of how to use radioisotopes as clocks.

An important decay product of long term isotopes is helium (from alpha decay). If the Earth is billions of years old, we’d be possibly be suffocated by an overabundance of helium in the atmosphere, whereas the amount of helium in the atmosphere is consistent with around 40,000 years of radioactive decay.

Much of radioisotope dating relies on interpretation of ratios of parent elements to daughter decay products. The mainstream focuses only on select parent/daughter ratios that would indicate old age while completely ignoring parent/daughter ratios that overturn long ages such as the helium daughter product. This is cherry picking of data, which often opens the door to false inferences.

We are only beginning to understand that chemical, biological, mechanical and possibly cosmological mechanisms can affect radioisotopes. For example, in the Proton-21 laboratory in the Ukraine, electricity can alter nuclear decay rates and even nuclear structure. We know lighting can generate neutrons. We know focused lasers can accelerate nuclear decay rates by factors of billions. What if Noah's flood began to create the radio isotopes concentrated on the Earth's surface but absent elsewhere. This concentration of isotopes in the Earth's surface suggests that the radioisotopes did not originate from space dust, but from a recent catastrophe. See the excellent argument in a 38 minute video here:

Hydroplate Theory

There are other clocks that suggest the relative youth of the Earth. The amount of helium and lead trapped in zircons suggests an age of 6000 years. Why aren’t the oceans saturated with minerals by now since this process should take only a few million years to mix the minerals on land into the seas? How did oil wells trap pressure for millions of years without leaking out the pressure? Why aren’t the seafloors packed with sediments given how much erosion is going on? These clocks would suggest the Earth is no older than 30 million years.

Earth cannot be billions nor hundreds of millions of years old. Many clocks constraint the age to not be more than tens of million of years, and if the zircon clocks are right, this might even suggest the Earth is 6,000 years old. For these and other reasons, independent of theology, based on the physical evidence alone, YEC is a much better bet than most people are willing to give it credit for.


NOTES

1. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Nucle ... f-Uranium/
"The present-day abundance of uranium in the 'depleted' mantle exposed on the ocean floor is about 0.004 ppm. The continental crust, on the other hand, is relatively enriched in uranium at some 1.4 ppm. This represents a 70-fold enrichment compared with the primitive mantle. In fact, the uranium lost from the 'depleted' oceanic mantle is mostly sequestered in the continental crust."

2. http://www.creationresearch.org/crsq/ar ... Helium.htm
"Experiments co-sponsored by the Creation Research Society show that helium leakage deflates radioisotopic ages. In 1982 Robert Gentry found amazingly high retentions of nuclear-decay-generated helium in microscopic zircons (ZrSiO4 crystals) recovered from a borehole in hot Precambrian granitic rock at Fenton Hill, NM. We contracted with a high-precision laboratory to measure the rate of helium diffusion out of the zircons. The initial results were very encouraging. Here we report newer zircon diffusion data that extend to the lower temperatures (100º to 277º C) of Gentry's retention data. The measured rates resoundingly confirm a numerical prediction we made based on the reported retentions and a young age. Combining rates and retentions gives a helium diffusion age of 6,000 ± 2,000 years."

3. Here is the atmospheric helium analysis, and it deals with some of the detractors against YEC interpretation:
https://answersingenesis.org/age-of-the ... tmosphere/

4. Here is something about the special nature of water on Earth vs the rest of the Solar Systam
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencen ... story.html

5. Regarding Planets:
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebo ... nces4.html

DanieltheDragon
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Post #6

Post by DanieltheDragon »

What I do believe and why
________________________________

To the best of my understanding I believe that the earth is pretty old. I think it is important to note that science is an ever improving field what we knew in the 1800's is not as accurate as what we knew in the 1900's and what we know now is more accurate than what we knew then.

It is a confluence of multiple evidences that seem to point to an older age. From Ice core samples to the fossil record to the formation of the grand canyon. To even the sun itself.

I don't know if the bible is true or not. I don't think it really matters either when discussing this because the bible can't give us the answer. If we want to know what that answer is we have to take that journey ourselves and sift through the data we have available.

It takes 8 minutes for light to reach the earth from the sun. Photons are amazing particles captured here at 1,000,000,000,000 frames per second you can see the light particles travel through a bottle.

[youtube][/youtube]

when we look at other stars the same process is happening as those photons are traveling through space to our eyes just like light through that bottle. It takes time for these particles to cover that distance.

So when we look up at a star what we see has already happened. If we look out at the sun whatever we see now happened 8 minutes ago because that's how long it took for light to reach us from the sun. When we look further out still time stretches even further. The Andromeda galaxy is about 2,500,000 light years from earth. That means those particles you saw in the bottle take about 2,500,000 million years to travel that distance to reach us where we are now. How can the universe be so young when we can perceive things that are so far?

Ice cores can very accurately show the age of their development and even share us information about the atmosphere at the time when they were frozen. We have ice core samples that go back hundreds of thousands of years. How can the earth only be 10,000 years old when we have 150,000 year old ice?

Its not that I need to believe in an age of 4.5 billion years. I just don't see how it is possible to derive of a young age for the earth or the universe.

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Post #7

Post by stcordova »

If there are no other objections, I'm happy to proceed with the next round regarding the fossil record.





PS

1. I was very ill for the last two weeks and I'm still recovering. Apologies for the delay in the debate.

2. The accuracy of ice core dating is suspect because of non-independent, circularly reasoned clock calibrations.

See:
Ice Cores vs. the Flood

3. I address the distant starlight issue in the relevant round regarding the age of the universe

stcordova
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Post #8

Post by stcordova »

ROUND 3

AGE OF THE FOSSIL RECORD


First I'd like to thank DanielTheDragon for his patience and civility since this debate is now several weeks in progress.

Formally speaking, the Universe, the Solar System, the Earth could be billions of years old but the fossil record could be recent. In fact, it is even formally possible life had been here billions of years, but the age of the fossils in our record could be relatively recent. This is what I refer to as the Young Life Creation (YLC) model. The YLC model can be a part of either the YEC or OEC models. I like the YLC model because it defensible and focuses on the narrow question on the age of life and does not deal directly with the age of other things.

Let me at least argue that the fossils we have discovered show strong evidence that they are relatively recent phenomenon.

When we attempt to determine the time of death of an organism, it strikes me as irrelevant to test the age of the rocks they are buried in. If a detective arrived at a crime scene and tried to establish the time of death, does it make any sort of sense to date the rocks around the corpse? No. Likewise the dates of the rocks in establishing the time of death of a fossil is the wrong clock to look at. It is better to examine other forensic evidence.

In the case of fossils, we have clocks that can give at least an outer bound to the time of death. They are:

1. C-14 trace amounts
2. amino acid racemization
3. DNA decay
4. erosion considerations

It is well known and widely acknowledge that the carboniferous era (supposedly 300 million years ago) has ubiquitous traces of C-14 that would indicate ages no greater than 100,000 years. We have found C-14 in fossils of every era, even the Cambrian (supposedly 500 million years ago). It would seem at the least, then, the claim that these fossils are hundreds of millions of year old is suspect. Many argue the cause of the C14 is contamination, but these objections fail on scientific grounds in my humble opinion. An analysis of the question of contamination was explored here:

Please help poor Thornton

Next we have the problem of amino acid racemization. It is a well known fact that life is made of left-handed amino acids, and that after death, the amino acids go from being all left-handed to a 50-50 mix of left and right. This process is called racemization. Racemization should happen easily within millions of years if not even thousands. Some racemization half lives of amino acids are on the order of hundreds of years.

The half life of DNA is 521 years given certain conditions. Certainly even under favorable conditions DNA should not be lingering around millions of years. Yet both DNAs and unracemized amino acids are abundant in the fossil record.

Finally, erosion rates should have erased the fossil record. Erosion of a mere 6cm per 1000 years will wipe out the fossil record within a 10s of millions years. It seems reasonably evident the erosion rates are in the ball park of 6cm per 1000 years. So it seems especially incompatible with the notion of a fossil record that is 500 million years old.

Finally, when I asked geologists about fossil layers, I asked them if the layers that contain well-preserved permineralized fossils formed quickly or slowly, they answer, "quickly" :shock:

If a creature dies and is not rapidly buried, it will be subject to scavangers and decay. Amazingly, not only must scavenging be prevented, but also bacterial decay. One way this can be done is if the burial is especially rapid and involving water and minerals. It would appear, the fossil record involved some great cataclysmic flood.

Also, what of the wooly mammoths in Siberia. They are frozen to death with tropical undigested tropical vegetation in their stomach. If they died slowly, the digestive substances in their stomachs would have decomposed the vegetation, but it didn't. This suggests these mammoths weren't living in a wintery land at all but were living in tropical conditions that were suddenly hit with a cataclysmic blizzard. Many Christians believe this was a consequence of Noah's flood....

So not only do we have evidence the fossils are recent, but they died horribly and were buried rapidly. If the burial was rapid, then the fossil layers didn't take millions of years to form as a matter of principle.

Whether one believes in an Ark is a separate question from whether there was a global catastrophe involving water. I believe the evidence points to a global catastrophe involving water.

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Post #9

Post by DanieltheDragon »

[Replying to stcordova]

First I would like to apologize for my delay. I have been moving to a new city and a few other things and got slammed by the holidays. So I wanted to wait and respond when I had a clear head and time to focus on the debate at hand.

To respond to the above post there are a few things I would like to point out.


1.
When we attempt to determine the time of death of an organism, it strikes me as irrelevant to test the age of the rocks they are buried in. If a detective arrived at a crime scene and tried to establish the time of death, does it make any sort of sense to date the rocks around the corpse? No. Likewise the dates of the rocks in establishing the time of death of a fossil is the wrong clock to look at. It is better to examine other forensic evidence.
This would represent a very narrow view of a plethora of reasons why you would date nearby rocks to get an approximate age of the fossil in question. For example a volcanic flow even a pyroclastic flow can be used as a baseline for dating the fossils contained within or below the flow.

A famous example of this is Pompeii. This is both a recent event and easy for people to understand why dating a rock would give an accurate date as to when the event occurred. It would logically follow that dating the volcanic ash deposits in and around the fossils would give an accurate date to when the event occurred.

Similarly we find fossils under such geological features it would logically follow that if you have a layer that is dated around 100,000 years ago any subsequent layers beneath it would be that old or older. It would not logically follow to have a geological layer be younger than the layer on top of it. Therefore you can get an approximate date for the fossils contained within that layer.

Now if the fossils were just sitting on top of the surface in a disturbed geological feature it would not follow to date the rocks around it as there would be no reliable way to associate the two items together.

Speaking of determining the time of death investigators use a whole host of factors including insects and what gestational stage they are in. While it might not be dating rocks investigators use something similar. They check for the presence of a watch, if there was an impact to the watch it can give a rough estimate to the time of the event at which it occurred. Much like a volcanic flow over a fossil.


2. C-14

C-14 is generally seen as not accurate for dating things outside of 50,000 years since the amount of C-14 is to small to accurately measure anything. Still some Carboniferous formations contain varying amounts of C-14. The most widely used example would be within fossil fuels as the name implies the fuels are derived from fossils namely plant matter. Coal being the most common among them. The amount of C-14 in carboniferous era coal can vary wildly. Consequently the deposits with the lowest amount of C-14 tend to be the most ideal for purveyors of fossil fuels and as this is the case reliable methods have been put into place to detect the amount within them. This also leads us as to how the C-14 got there in the first place.

The main culprit it seems would be radioactive decay of the uranium-thorium isotope series which could produce C-14 in enough quantities to have 14C/C of 10-14 or 10-13. Additionally it has been proposed that micro-organism could cause it to be 10-13.

Again when we have something interesting or an unexpected result we could take the simplest route and say well god did it because I can't explain it or we could look into alternative reasons. The presence of C-14 in detectable unexpected numbers is interesting by looking into how they got there we find new and interesting things that help in other areas, like Neutrino detection for example. By figuring out how the C-14 got in there we can develop new methods for detecting C-14 possibly making it more accurate for dating beyond 50,000 years and making better scintillating materials for neutrino research.

3.DNA

The article you are referring to that proposes a DNA half-life of 521 years can be found here

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/ ... /1748/4724

this was at an avg temperature of 13.1C it also points out that the rate of decay is dependent on environmental factors like temperature. an Ideal temperature of -5C could preserve readable DNA up to 1.8 million years and DNA fragments to 6 million years. While this puts the idea of finding Dino DNA to rest it still allows for the possibility of discovering and decoding ancient DNA that has been well preserved.

Given a possible range of 10,000-6,000,000 depending on the conditions and amount of DNA present the half-life of DNA being 521 really makes no difference to whether DNA present in ancient fossils means a young or old creation. it certianly does not limit life to being only 10,000 years old. Nor does it mean that fossils with DNA present readable or not are younger than 10,000 years old. Suffice it to say DNA present in fossils does not lead to a logical conclusion that it must have existed recently.


4
.Also, what of the wooly mammoths in Siberia. They are frozen to death with tropical undigested tropical vegetation in their stomach. If they died slowly, the digestive substances in their stomachs would have decomposed the vegetation, but it didn't. This suggests these mammoths weren't living in a wintery land at all but were living in tropical conditions that were suddenly hit with a cataclysmic blizzard. Many Christians believe this was a consequence of Noah's flood....
The biological features of a woolly mammoth prevent them from surviving in a tropical climate. It wouldn't take a cataclysmic blizzard to kill them simply living at tropical temperatures would do the job. As for undigested tropical plants I would appreciate a citation there as I can't find a journal that repeats this.

5. Geology and quick...

When asking someone who deals in millions or billions of years what quick is quick could be considered 100's or thousands of years. Quick is a subjective term and fossils form in a whole variety of ways. So yes quick is how most fossils are formed but quick is relative and can vary wildly. I don't think you will find someone who will claim it takes millions of years for fossils to form but 100-1000 years is not out of the question. It depends on a whole host of factors and it is very very rare that we have perfectly preserved specimens more often than not its a tooth here a leg bone there completely preserved fossilized skeletons with fossilized soft-tissue is very very very rare. Not impossible as there are some examples but certainly not common.


6. Blanket statements.

There is generally a rule of thumb that blanket statements are almost always wrong.

So not only do we have evidence the fossils are recent, but they died horribly and were buried rapidly.
I don't deny this is the case for some fossils indeed there are recent catastrophe like Pompeii were people died rapidly and horribly. In fact a pyroclastic flow will kill you and fossilize you very very very rapidly (seconds almost) because of the heat and pressures involved.

However, fossils form in a whole wide variety of mechanisms like tar pits ice death floods mudflows rockslides and on and on and on. The fact that we have fossils in a whole host of ways rules out one overriding catastrophe that killed them all.

There is evidence for localized floods there is evidence for localized catastrophes but there is no evidence for a global flood.



________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________



However, that is nit picking someones argument. In order to logically conclude that life is young there can be no evidence that life could be old. Indeed if I were to find one example of a fossil that can not be refuted to be older than whatever the cut off point for young and old is it would refute the young hypothesis.

Lets say for example that I claim that German shepherds cannot weigh more than 80lbs nor can they be older than 8 years. If someone were to present a 9 year old 81lb german shepherd that would refute the idea of my 8 year old 80lb limit.

Indeed if I were to find a fossil that is 11,000 years old that was irrefutably dated as such it would be logically impossible to conclude that life was less than 10,000 years old.

So the question is what is the difference between a young life model vs an old life model.

is it 10,000-100,000 years? is 100,000 years to old or to young to be considered old or young? what about 1,000,000?

If you were to ask a geologist 1,000,000 would be pretty young. So I need an example that goes beyond that just to be on the safe side.


Oh well hmm how convenient the Jehol biota is. Among the fossils found here are specimens completely encased in volcanic ash which is incredibly easy to date.

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The Jehol biota is rich with animals that were killed and entombed in volcanic ash. and the date past 120,000,000 years. This would lead one to logically conclude that a young life model is impossible.


Now as for the flood as a mass extinction event. I find this incredibly unlikely. The bible only describes 1 mass extinction event. I won't go into the logistics of it but suffice it to say the way it is described in the bible is logically impossible.

That is all well and good except there have been not one but 5 mass extinction events. The most recent the Cretaceous-Palogene most likely caused by a large asteroid or astronomical object created what is known as the K-pg boundary that can be found in throughout the world's terrestrial and marine rock formations it has a distinct iridium signature that is consistent throughout the world and not commonly found on earth but in asteroids. This layer is consistently dated to 65million years.

So here we have a layer that essentially blankets the entire globe. This would leave us to logically conclude that whatever is found above this layer is younger than what it is dated at (roughly 65-66 million years) and whatever is below it should be older.

Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event (End Cretaceous, K-T extinction, or K-Pg extinction): 66 Ma at the Cretaceous(Maastrichtian)-Paleogene(Danian) transition interval.[8] The K–T event is now officially called the Cretaceous–Paleogene (or K–Pg) extinction event in place of Cretaceous-Tertiary. About 17% of all families, 50% of all genera[9] and 75% of all species became extinct.[10] In the seas it reduced the percentage of sessile animals to about 33%. All non-avian dinosaurs became extinct during that time.[11] The boundary event was severe with a significant amount of variability in the rate of extinction between and among different clades. Mammals and birds emerged as dominant land vertebrates in the age of new life.
Triassic–Jurassic extinction event (End Triassic): 200 Ma at the Triassic-Jurassic transition. About 23% of all families, 48% of all genera (20% of marine families and 55% of marine genera) and 70% to 75% of all species went extinct.[9] Most non-dinosaurian archosaurs, most therapsids, and most of the large amphibians were eliminated, leaving dinosaurs with little terrestrial competition. Non-dinosaurian archosaurs continued to dominate aquatic environments, while non-archosaurian diapsids continued to dominate marine environments. The Temnospondyl lineage of large amphibians also survived until the Cretaceous in Australia (e.g., Koolasuchus).
Permian–Triassic extinction event (End Permian): 251 Ma at the Permian-Triassic transition. Earth's largest extinction killed 57% of all families, 83% of all genera and 90% to 96% of all species[9] (53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species, including insects).[12] The evidence of plants is less clear, but new taxa became dominant after the extinction.[13] The "Great Dying" had enormous evolutionary significance: on land, it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles. The recovery of vertebrates took 30 million years,[14] but the vacant niches created the opportunity for archosaurs to become ascendant. In the seas, the percentage of animals that were sessile dropped from 67% to 50%. The whole late Permian was a difficult time for at least marine life, even before the "Great Dying".
Late Devonian extinction: 375–360 Ma near the Devonian-Carboniferous transition. At the end of the Frasnian Age in the later part(s) of the Devonian Period, a prolonged series of extinctions eliminated about 19% of all families, 50% of all genera[9] and 70% of all species.[citation needed] This extinction event lasted perhaps as long as 20 Ma, and there is evidence for a series of extinction pulses within this period.
Ordovician–Silurian extinction events (End Ordovician or O-S): 450–440 Ma at the Ordovician-Silurian transition. Two events occurred that killed off 27% of all families, 57% of all genera and 60% to 70% of all species.[9] Together they are ranked by many scientists as the second largest of the five major extinctions in Earth's history in terms of percentage of genera that went extinct.

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