So what you are saying is that accelerated decay is an ad hoc attempt to explain away the evidence against a young Earth, therefore it isn't ad hoc.
With regard to Yellowstone, why should the radiometric dates reflect the *lower* limit ? And with the evidence of in place trees, surely such a dating would be evidence AGAINST accelerated decay since a single catastrophe is not a viable explanation.
And sadly it seems that you can't see is that what you call "complexity" is the number of coincidences you need to invoke to explain why so much data supports an old Earth.
Either you have your "it's a catastrophe so of course it will look like the result of a long slow process" excuse or you have "well God just happened to do everything in way which created a false appearance of age". Which as I say is theologically much the same as the more common "appearance of age" argument which attributes false age to the creation rather than, as you have it, the Flood.
Even if you assume a Flood and assume that God used CPT to do it, it doesn't follow that God would initiate it by manipulating decay rates - the heat is what is needed and a miracle could do that. The difference is that manipulating decay rates creates a false appearance of age.
Even if you assume that God would manipulate decay rates it doesn't follow that all the decay rates used for dating rocks would change proportionally - the mechanisms of decay vary enough that changes in physical constants, say, would not produce that result. Indeed there seems to be no reason to do such a thing, except to create a false appearance of age.
And other processes - whether by coincidence or by design also have to speed up by the right rates to produce the false appearance of age.
So we have three alternatives:
1) God is out to deceive us
2) God just happened to create huge amounts of deceptive evidence for no reason any of us can think of
3) The Earth really is old.
Got any reason why 2 should be treated as a credible answer ?
[This message has been edited by PaulK, 10-31-2003]
[This message has been edited by PaulK, 10-31-2003]