How old is the Earth?!

Most of your post has been dealth with adequately. One more comment: This is a flat-out lie. In a very few cases dates from recent lava flows have come back excessively large, and there are no such cases that are not explained.Most of such cases that were generated by creationists are explained by improper sample selection. I wonder why a supposedly knowledgeable geologist selects samples so obviously wrong ... it couldn't be so as to cheat, could it?

All the ideas that have been proposed for the source of the water or changes in the Earth's topography (other than the idea of God making it appear miraculously) involve the release of so much energy in the form of heat that "boiling" is an inadequate term. Venus would be Antarctica by comparison, and essentially all life on Earth would be destroyed (maybe a few bacteria would survive). Vapor canopy, ice canopy, ice asteroid impact, water released from below, catastrophic plate tectonics, rapid mountain bulding ... all of them release enough heat to destroy life several times over."Scientific" creationists don't want to say it was a miracle; if they did they would have to give up the pretense that they're scientific. So they mumble and dissemble a lot when the subject comes up. Any proposal for the source of the water must include a calculation of the heat involved, and that calculation must be both performed and reviewed by experts, or the proposal is meaningless.See, for example, Water and Vapor and Noah's Flood.

Sorry, no, there aren't any such theories.Some people. e.g. Dr. Baugh, have asserted that a pre-flood canopy would've created the perfect weather world-wide. However, they all have "solved" the heat problem by ignoring it, and they have no evidence for their claims of "perfect weather". That's not a theory.As I said, Any proposal for the source of the water must include a calculation of the heat involved, and that calculation must be both performed and reviewed by experts, or the proposal is meaningless.See. for example, the ICR's SENSITIVITY STUDIES ON VAPOR CANOPY TEMPERATURE PROFILES, in which they conclude that arbitrary and ad-hoc variation of many factors to maximize the water content of a vapor canopy just might, if you're a true believer, get enough water to cover the Earth to a depth of 2 meters (just over 6 feet) into a canopy without killing everything, and conclude that Dillow and Vardiman were flat-out wrong. Or Walter Brown's Scientific Arguments Opposing a Canopy.Glenn Morton has an interesting page on the history of the canopy idea at The Demise and Fall of the Water Vapor Canopy: A Fallen Creationist Idea.{edited to fix units conversion error}[This message has been edited by JonF, 11-28-2003]

You're right.