Paging johnfolton. Bring your evidence for a young earth.

OK, johnfolton, this is the Dating Forum. This is where your contentions of a young earth should be posted and defended.Here is your big chance. Let's see you present and defend your AnswersinGenesis talking points on young earth here where the topic belongs.And because you relied on the RATE Project in your post on a previous thread, here are a couple of articles for you to brush up on before you present your evidence. (Note, I said evidence--this is the Science Forum, so you have to present evidence for your contentions.)Here are the two articles, with brief excerpts from the conclusions of each: Assessing the RATE Project: Essay Review by Randy Isaac

The conclusions of the RATE project are being billed as “groundbreaking results.” This is a fairly accurate description since a group of creation scientists acknowledge that hundreds of millions of years worth of radioactivity have occurred. They attempt to explain how this massive radioactivity could have occurred in a few thousand years but admit that consistent solutions have not yet been found. The vast majority of the book is devoted to providing technical details that the authors believe prove that the earth is young and that radioisotope decay has not always been constant. All of these areas of investigation have been addressed elsewhere by the scientific community and have been shown to be without merit. The only new data provided in this book are in the category of additional details and there are no significantly new claims.

​

In this book, the authors admit that a young-earth position cannot be reconciled with the scientific data without assuming that exotic solutions will be discovered in the future. No known thermodynamic process could account for the required rate of heat removal nor is there any known way to protect organisms from radiation damage. The young-earth advocate is therefore left with two positions. Either God created the earth with the appearance of age (thought by many to be inconsistent with the character of God) or else there are radical scientific laws yet to be discovered that would revolutionize science in the future. The authors acknowledge that no current scientific understanding is consistent with a young earth. Yet they are so confident that these problems will be resolved that they encourage a message that the reliability of the Bible has been confirmed.

Do the RATE Findings Negate Mainstream Science?

Young-earth creationists have long claimed there is no evidence for an old Earth. The fact that billions of years of nuclear decay have occurred in Earth history has been denied by most young-earth creationists. Now, the RATE team has admitted that, taken at face value, radiometric dating data is most easily and directly explained by the Earth being billions of years old. This is a remarkable development because no longer can young-earth creationists claim it is merely the naturalistic worldview that makes scientists believe rocks and minerals are millions or billions of years old.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

No, I prefer to leave it in the Dating Forum and have you present scientific evidence--if you can.So far you have not presented any scientific evidence. Your suppositions and ramblings would get you laughed out of a high school science class, and certainly can't be mistaken for scientific evidence.Perhaps if you just addressed a single point concerning the RATE Project we could discuss that in more detail.For example, you write "The RATE Boys believe accelerated decay happened they have not said how yet..." This does not exactly inspire any confidence in their scientific findings, but does illustrate their religious bias. I don't know why you would place any trust in that kind of science (except that it agrees with your a priori beliefs).Or, do you have some scientific evidence for accelerated decay that scientists don't know about? Perhaps that would be a good place to start--just what you consider to be scientific evidence for accelerated decay.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

From Assessing the RATE Project: Essay Review by Randy Isaac

the authors fail to explain how such a fundamental constant of particle physics could change even a tiny amount. Experimental data and theoretical considerations have shown the strong coupling constant to be indeed a constant. Furthermore, to explain their results, the authors must speculate that this coupling constant took a different value in at least two time periods in the past: the first three days of creation week and the year of the Flood. At other times, it was the same as today. A further complication is the need to postulate that some nuclei were affected but not others. They state that C-14 did not have an accelerated decay constant while heavier nuclei did. As a result, not only have the authors failed to make a case for accelerated decay, they must assert an extraordinary variation of the strong coupling constant as a function of time and of nuclear weight to force-fit the data.
​
4. Two Unsolved Problems: Heat and Radiation
​
The authors report that faced with this evidence, a young-earth advocate must address at least two key scientific problems resulting from a one-year period of accelerated decay rates during the Flood. The first is the heat problem. Thermal energy from radioactive processes is a major source of heat in the earth. If those processes were accelerated by many orders of magnitude, the earth would have quickly evaporated from the heat had there not been an extraordinary mechanism of cooling. The authors state:
​

The removal of heat was so rapid that it likely involved a process other than conduction, convection, or radiation . We believe it may be possible to discover how [God] did it (p. 763).

​
Future research is suggested along the lines of Russell Humphreys’ idea of volumetric cooling based on relativistic principles even though this known phenomenon, the basis for red-shifting of starlight, does not apply to bound particles such as the earth. It is acknowledged that this approach, even if it were valid, has the difficulty of being uniform rather than selective as would be needed to cool only radioactive material and not, for example, the oceans. In other words, the authors acknowledge that accelerated decay requires a most unusual heat removal mechanism that is outside the known laws of thermodynamics. The second unresolved problem cited in the book is the radiation problem. How did Noah and his passengers survive a year in which radioactivity was one million times greater than it is today? No known solution exists, they state. Nevertheless, “The RATE group is confident that these issues will be solved . ”

I think the entire RATE Project can be summed up in those last words: "The RATE group is confident that these issues will be solved . ”This is not science, this is religious apologetics. They spent well over a million dollars of creationists' donations to come up with scientific data, and when it agreed with what scientists had discovered long ago the RATE group refused to believe their own data.I think you still need to provide some reliable scientific evidence for accelerated decay. So far there seem to be insurmountable side affects in what you have suggested. Your gamma ray idea, whereby the sun accelerated radioactive decay, neglects to mention that the earth would have been cooked in the process. You are suggesting compressing 4.5 billion years of decay into just 10,000 years without accounting for the massive amounts of heat that would be generated.Do you want to move on to another aspect of the young earth problem, or do you want to try and provide additional evidence on this point?

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

No. The accelerated decay would have caused enough heat to cook the earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever for a "canopy." And no, the RATE folks are not onto something. They are twisting the facts, much as you are, but with a good deal more knowledge of science. They still can't make it work. Didn't you read the articles I posted that reviewed their work? Or are you pretending those reviews don't exist, along with so many other facts you have to ignore to allow you to comfortably believe in a young earth? The heat would have evaporated pretty much everything. You would have the equivalent of Saturn's rings circling the sun--for a brief while--until all the pieces drifted away.Don't you see the tremendous unintended consequences you end up with when you change one bit of science for your young earth convenience? You don't like the results of radiometric dates so you propose accelerated decay, but it cooks the earth. (Whoops!)OK, you still haven't presented any scientific evidence for a young earth. All you have done is propose a series of "just so" stories, all of which are contradicted by mountains of scientific evidence. That's not very convincing.Would you like to try once again?

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

The RATE team's ideas on accelerated decay have been refuted. I posted two links to detailed analyses upthread (or maybe on our other thread).The only ones who support accelerated decay are motivated by religious belief; those who follow science find no evidence for it and a boatload of evidence against it. Creation "science" is nonsense. This is the Science Forum, so you have to use real science. If you do that, and leave out scripture and unsupported religious belief, you'll be fine.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

One of the common arguments made in support of young-Earth creationism is that the dynamic age of the Earth-moon system (as determined by the physics of the Earth-moon tidal interaction) is too young to support a multi-billion year age for the system. In this article I will (a) review the basic physics of gravity and tides, (b) review the history of theoretical models for Earth-moon tides, (c) review the paleontological evidence relevant to the history of the Earth-moon system, and (d) demonstrate that the combination of theory and observation refute the young-Earth creationist arguments, with reference to specific young-Earth arguments and their specific failures. Source

​

​

For a long time, creationists claimed that the dust layer on the moon was too thin if dust had truly been falling on it for billions of years. They based this claim on early estimates—by evolutionists—of the influx of moon dust, and worries that the moon landers would sink into this dust layer. But these early estimates were wrong, and by the time of the Apollo landings, NASA was not worried about sinking. So the dust layer thickness can’t be used as proof of a young moon (or of an old one, either). See Moon-dust argument no longer useful and Moon dust and the age of the solar system (Technical). Source

Note: this last rebuttal is found on the creationist website AnswersinGenesis, in the article titled "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use." That talking point is too silly even for most creationists!You really have to do better than this if you want to be taken seriously on this website. These two creationist talking points you graced us with have been refuted thousands of times, and your presentation of them here only makes you look silly.Other than that, welcome!

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

That's Dr. Coyote to you son. And perhaps I should have said that creation "science" is religious apologetics, not science, but when it is filtered through your unique viewpoint and style of presentation, well, it does become nonsense.I gave you your own thread to present a scientific argument for a young earth, but you presented a jumble of oft-refuted creationist talking points and other creation "science." That material is only suited for convincing folks who already believe in a young earth and know little or nothing of science, and who are willing to ignore all evidence which shows them to be wrong.And that is why the admins are after you. You have presented no science which would stand up to high school science class scrutiny, let alone convince scientists. Religious apologetics might be acceptable in other fora, but this is the Science Forum.But you still have a couple of hundred posts to redeem yourself.

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.