ohmessylife

why do creationists need a young earth model? i'm guessing it has to do with the validation of the flood? could the flood have happened per se and the fossils and geological data still work?

how do creationists deny dating methods? how do they deny light speed and distances from stars to the earth!?

this is all confusing... i can't understand how they can blatantly lie. why don't they just accept that they don't know?

i think it's pretty amusing that looking up The Answers Book at finds it in the religion section and not the science section. The advertisements for Ken Ham and his cronie's books are all advertised as sold in christian book stores everywhere!

take care,
benny<a href="http://www.powells.com" target="_blank">powells books</a>

DutchAtheist

Biblical literalists need a young earth model because adding up all the 'begets' in the bible gives about 4000 years between Adam and Jesus. So they have to either admit that the bible is wrong (not likely) or be YEC's.

Albion

By relying on questionable extrapolations of outdated research, along with out-of-context quotes and a willingness to believe anything that supports their conclusions and nothing that doesn't. The Questions section of the Answers in Genesis website is a good place to get a wake-up call about how important "thou shalt not bear false witness" really is to these people.

Camaban

What gets me here is when someone who ought to have known uses some of those arguments, is caught out, and denys actively knowing such and such was false (especially the geologic columns, etc)

Tell me... Shouldn't making a false claim which can easily be confirmed/denied by 5 mins research (in a field that the author is supposed to know a decent amount about) be tantamount to lieing?

I mean, if they didn't know those basic things, then WTF are they doing writing books, etc as if they DO know all about these basic things?

tgamble

Maybe. I think it has more to do with the whole no death before sin nonsense.

No.

[quote]how do creationists deny dating methods?

Willful ignorance and stubborn denial.

They make stuff up.

I doubt they are capable!

OF course. The regular bookstores are controled by the evil evolutionist conspiracy.

ps418

Yes. You could suppose that the flood happened, even that it was global, but that it didnt deposit any substantial record. Of course this supposition is silly, because a recent global flood would leave gobs of evidence.

But if you want to argue that a substantial portion of the geologic record was deposited by a flood, then yes, you'd have to deny the validity of all kinds of geologic data and methods.

[ August 24, 2002: Message edited by: ps418 ]</p>

Kevin Dorner

The other (I could say main) reason for insisting on a young-earth model is that it doesn't give evolution enough time to account for the biodiversity we see today.

Paradoxically, this put YEC's into a bind. There was no possible way for there to be enough room on Noah's ark to contain all the species alive today and extinct species (pretty strong wood in that ark to hold two hundred-ton <a href="http://www.hcc.hawaii.edu/~pine/Phil100/argentinosaurus.html" target="_blank">Argentinosaurii</a>.) So they have ad hoc'ed together a hypothesis that after Noah only had to take those undefinable "kinds" and that they "microevolved" afterwards to produce observed diversity. Problem with this is that the "microevolution" would have had to occur several million times faster than is observed in nature to account for the numbers of alleles and speciation of present-day organisms that were supposedly the descendants of those two on the ark, so requires yet another invocation of "miracle" to save an unprovable hypothesis.

[ August 24, 2002: Message edited by: Kevin Dorner ]</p>

scigirl

There's a great site at talkorigins <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2c.html#conc" target="_blank">here</a> that deals with what interpretations of genesis are consistent with biological evidence, and which are not.

scigirl

Albion

Well, it's an interesting notion whether they really believe their own propaganda or know they're telling lies. The consensus does seem to be that Gish is so credulous that he actually believes this stuff. Whether that's true for the others is something that I personally doubt (actually I doubt it for Gish, but maybe I just can't get to grips with that mentality).

You see the stuff on those websites about the shrinking Sun, based on work that was shown to be incorrect 20 years ago and on the "neutrino problem," which was solved last year, and I suppose you could give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they hadn't got round to updating the site. But when you see detailed responses to the Sci Am article and the S. tchadensis discovery being prominently displayed within days of the original articles showing up, you know they can react fast when it suits them. The solution of the solar neutrino problem obviously isn't one of those cases.

I just have a feeling that they're rationalising it along the lines of evolution must be a lie because the Bible says so, and even if this particular bit is now solid evidence for evolution, it must still be a lie somewhere even though we can't tell where, or the evolutionists have made it up in order to discredit scripture, or something. So why correct it when it's obviously still wrong?

Most of the "arguments creationists shouldn't use" are fairly high-profile things - dinosaur tracks, moon dust - I don't suppose most people know or care all that much about solar neutrinos, so they're safe to leave the old rubbish in their "pro-creationism" column.