Omphalism

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In my biblical omphalist mode I am indeed advocating that you should be agnostic towards biblical omphalism. You cannot falsfy it and empiricism, whilst a useful practical tool, is not a path to truth.

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This 'agnostic to x' debate is a bit of a red herring (I recognize you're playing devil's advocate here). I say that because of the billions of propositions we could consider. We don't need to waste our time deciding whether we should be agnostic to them all or rule them out - because all we need to do is limit our attention to the propositions that actually have positive evidence in their favour, and decide between those.Likewise we should simply ignore all propositions that cannot in theory be decided by evidence, such as omphalism.We may not get to the truth by this route - but we stop worrying about irrelevancies, and there's a chance we'll get an approximation of the truth. Edited by Peepul, : No reason given.

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What is the rational conclusion regarding the age of the Earth?

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The scientific consensus age of 4.x billion years

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How confident of this conclusion do you think we can rationally be?

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Reasonably confident - the biggest assumption is constancy of physics, but this seems to have some evidence to support it. [/quote]

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Does your answer to this question (with the implicit lack of certainty that we all seem to agree is necessary) really allow you to claim agnosticism towards the conclusion that the Earth was created less than a week ago?

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My approach means we rule out omphalism as a possibility because it is intrinsically impossible to prove or disprove.