Arguments

7. Conclusion

He finishes his argument with lies and hypocrisy. He proudly pats himself on the back for identifying all sorts of evidence which supposedly points to a young Earth (although as I've shown above, he's sadly mistaken), but he admits that it's silly to take the Bible so literally that you can assign precise time figures from life spans and generations. Naturally, it doesn't seem to occur to him that anything less than absolute 100% literal interpretation is merely an admission that the Bible is not the literal truth, in which case there's no reason to run around using it as evidence in a debate about scientific theories.

I've carefully avoided mentioning the genealogical "proof" of the age of mankind, because counting "begats," as you put it, is not a very good method to determine passage of time. But it is very interesting that a lot of the scientific evidence points to a much younger earth than the evolutionists were (and still are) looking for, isn't it?

Like all YECs, he starts with a pre-ordained conclusion and hunts for any data which seems to fit, while ignoring the question of mechanisms, thermodynamics, and the fact that the vast majority of the data doesn't fit. This is totally ass-backwards, since you're supposed to start with the data rather than the conclusion. I refer you once again to the scatter chart earlier in this page. If you take a look at the chart with an open mind, the pattern is obvious. But if you act like a YEC and spend all your time analyzing outlier data while ignoring the main group, you're bound to come up with some pretty weird conclusions.

Historical Addendum

I am frankly sickened almost to the point of physical nausea by YEC insistences that old Earth theories are generated for the benefit of evolution theory. Let's get something straight, people: Charles Darwin was born in 1809. Were old Earth theories invented to support him, and were they inspired by a dogmatic need to protect evolution theory? The answer, of course, is no, and no.

Journey with me back in time, more than two thousand years. The ancient Greek philosopher Xenophanes (570-470BC) noticed sea-shell fossils on mountains and concluded that they must have been formed by very slow processes, hence an old Earth. Herodotus (484-426BC) realized a century later that the northward bulge of Egypt into the Mediterranean can only be explained through the gradual deposition of mud which was carried there by the Nile river. Both of them felt that the world must be very old on the basis of the sheer volume of fossils and the time required for their formation, although Xenophanes felt that the Earth must have once been covered by globe-spanning seas, hence technically making him an old-Earth catastrophist (a somewhat oxymoronic term in the modern world).

The idea that the Earth is very old was not seriously challenged until the rise of Christian dogma and its insistence that all observations be seen through the virtually opaque filter of Biblical interpretation. Eastern and western attitudes toward the age of the Earth began to seriously diverge at that point, and thus was born the Dark Ages. Scientific advancement virtually ceased throughout all of Europe, which consumed itself with tribal and religious wars that often required the involvement or subjugation of unwilling neighbours.

The first millenium AD saw the widening of the divergence between western and eastern conceptions of the Earth's age. Theophilus of Antioch (115-181AD) proposed the "begat" method to determine the age of the Earth from the Bible, while in China, Tu Yü (222-284AD) ordered monuments to his achievements placed at both the foot and peak of a mountain because he predicted that gradual processes would eventually cause hills to become valleys and valleys to become hills. In the mid 10th century, Arab scholars in what is now known as Iraq theorized that sea and land exchanged matter through the processes of disintegration, sediment transport and seabed compaction, thus effectively causing the movement of continents over very long periods of time, and in the late 11th centgury, the Chinese scientist Shen Kua theorized that certain inland regions must have once been shores, because he found fossils of the appropriate coastal life arranged in the appropriate patterns.

The scientific stagnation in Europe was by now so deplorable that English philosopher Roger Bacon (1214-1292AD) harshly criticized the Church for its doctrine of biblical interpretation over the scientific method, but of course, he was imprisoned for his troubles. More than 200 years later, Leonardo Da Vinci tried to promote gradualism more delicately, and so escaped imprisonment for his heretical observations of communities of related sea life, such as clams, mussels, and oysters ... hmmm ... I haven't had seafood in a while. Hungry ... anyway, where was I? Oh yes, Leonardo Da Vinci observed that fossils of such creatures were preserved so that the communities remained intact, and he reasoned that a catastrophic flood would have disrupted any such patterns, so they must have been laid down very gradually, rather than in a single catastrophic event. While Da Vinci escaped imprisonment, the Chuch's only response was to refine its "begat" method a century later under James Ussher, to produce the current YEC date of 4004BC for the creation of the Earth.

Nevertheless, Da Vinci planted the seed of fresh ideas, and he was soon followed by other thinkers such as Nicolaus Steno (1638-1686, father of the geological Principle of Superposition and considered by some to be the father of geology itself), Robert Hooke (1635-1703, a legendary scientist who identified patterns of great time passage and species alteration in fossil records, although he didn't describe a mechanism for this change, unlike Darwin), and James Hutton (1726-1797), who presented very carefully reasoned arguments on the cyclical gradualist processes that drive the formation of geological structures within the Earth. His "Theory of the Earth" was published in 1788 and described many modern principles such as subterranean heat as a driving force for geological change, the differentiation between sedimentary and igneous rock, plate uplift as the cause for discontinuities, etc.

By now, we're about half a century away from Darwin's "Origin of Species". Age estimates of the Earth were already ranging into the hundreds of millions of years, and any age figures less than tens of millions of years were conclusively ruled out as being physically impossible for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the planet would still be untenably hot if it were any younger.

Sadly, I doubt that our YEC friend bothered to do any research on any of this, since he thinks gradualism is just a support structure for evolution theory. It was invented solely for the purpose of helping "evolutionists", right? Yeah, that's it. That's the ticket ...

Recommended reading: Problems with a Global Flood, 2nd Edition from TalkOrigins.org. This is the authoritative work on the sheer impossibility of young-Earth creationism.

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