Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

And this relates how to RAZD's argument that "the flood of Noah is impossible"?

That's a false dichotomy. He's real and a joke.I look forward to the promotion of his thread. Arguably I am not a nice person.

Well, anyone using a magnetic compass will be screwed. However, we'll have some warning --- the strength of the poles will weaken and they'll start to wander in an unprecedented way, so we'll see it coming.I don't know what proportion of migrating animals use geomagnetism.Geomagnetic reversals are not associated with extinction events (and a good thing too) so the effect on biology will likely be minimal.The weakening of the Earth's magnetic field will (IIRC) allow the solar wind to hit us harder than it usually does. Some people have suggested that this would be very bad, but again it is a fact that reversals are not associated with extinction events, so it can't be that bad. But there might well be an uptick in cancer rates.It is thought that such an event might well happen quite soon, but that's "quite soon" in geologist time, so maybe some time in the next few thousand years. If you want to worry about something, worry about Yellowstone erupting instead.

Well, forewarned is forearmed. If it happens, and you're anywhere near it, get inside, shut the doors and windows, and turn off the air-conditioning. This won't avert the post-apocalyptic nightmare, but at least your lungs won't be shredded by volcanic glass.

Well, what would one do?Take the age of the Earth. We could add up the genealogy and the other time intervals, and we could find that if the Bible was right, the universe is ~6000 years old. This gives us a hypothesis. We can derive predictions from this about what we should see if we look at radiometric dating, at dendrochronology, at sedimentology, at the night sky, etc. Then we can compare these predictions with observation, find that they are wrong, and consider the theory falsified. That's science.At this point, though, what the creationists do is start making up ad hoc piecemeal excuses for each particular bit of evidence falsifying the hypothesis --- excuses based not on evidence, but on wishful thinking. Well, that's not science.You can't square the circle. You either have to provisionally accept that the scientific method has given us the right answer, and that Biblical literalism is an untenable hypothesis --- or you can have faith without evidence that science is wrong where it conflicts with Biblical literalism. If you take the first option, you stop being a creationist, but if you take the second option, you stop doing science.It's not a question of the evolutionists "putting aside their views". That's easy, that's what I do when I contemplate Biblical literalism as a hypothesis, treating it the same as any other hypothesis. The problem is that to believe the hypothesis to be unfalsified, I would have to put aside the scientific method itself --- in which case I might be doing creationist apologetics, but I'm not doing creation science.

I'm sorry we couldn't be more help, but the trouble is that creationism may be beyond help. After all, you guys have had hundreds of years to come up with something. If your most hopeful idea now is to appeal to the evolutionists to see if we can do any better ... well, what are the chances of that?