Young Earth Creationists

[PedroPonyLikesCrisps]

I know Young Earth Creationists exist, I've seen them on telly, but never met one in real life, so I'm just wondering if anyone here is one or knows one or whether they are actually just incredibly rare and reserved for extreme tv debating!

I had a look around for you, and while I couldn't find the minimum theoretical amount of time it would take for a diamond to naturally form, I found that:

"As a generalization, most diamonds formed more than 990 million years ago, deep within the earth, from either of two rock types, peridotite and eclogite. They were stored below the base of cratons for varying periods of time, some as long as 3,200 million years, before being transported to the surface." here

Wikipedia says "Carbon-containing minerals provide the carbon source, and the growth occurs over periods from 1 billion to 3.3 billion years (25% to 75% of the age of the Earth"

Unfortunately for the fundamentalists among us, "Scientists have unearthed diamonds more than 4 billion years old and trapped inside crystals of zircon."

bumbley - The questioning over a detail which doesn't at all affect the point does look like your are trying to catch a mistake. Apologies if that wasn't the case and you were only too lazy to Google it yourself

BestValue:

I noticed you were getting somewhat hung up on this whole carbon dating issue, particularly around dinosaur bones etc.

Let us first clarify that when people find 'dinosaur bones', they are actually finding a fossil. A fossil is NOT the original object, it is instead a collection of minerals that have replaced the object.

Now, you find the discovery of carbon-14 inside these fossils to be a case against them being millions of years old. However, it is perfectly possible, even expected, to get carbon-14 in very old fossils. This is because fossils regularly contain uranium or thorium. As uranium decays (over millions of years) it releases alpha particles.

Inside our million year old fossils all of our original C-14 has decayed into nitrogen-14. So, millions of years after the bone 'died' we end up with some N-14 and some decaying uranium. The alpha particles from the decaying uranium provide the energy required to initiate a process whereby N-14 is converted back into C-14. This is why very old fossils contain C-14 that can make people mistakenly believe they are only 20-50 thousand years old. Hopefully this clears up any confusion you had.

Wasn't tissue found inside dinosaur bones recently?

Talking about dinosaurs, how about the age of meteor craters?

This one in South Africa is apparently 2 billion years old.

And this one is thought to have caused the dinosaurs their 135-million-year dominance on earth. In any case, it dates from about 65 million years ago.

No doubt everyone sees where I'm going with this.

would it be....that the earth is actually billions of years old?
Even after reading all this creationist stuff I just cannot get my head around the contortions necassary to believe the earth is 6000 years old and ignore all science and thousands of scientists. While I dont actually care what individuals think inside their own heads, some of this stuff is affecting schools and being taught to children. That does bother me.

Cote, I think the idea being presented is that the dating is wrong. I'm sure BV will be back later to confirm...

Oh yes, how could I forget. Radiometric dating is wrong. Geologists, scientists, astrophysicists are all wrong wrong wrong.

BestValue is right. He gets alerts about threads on the internet about YEC and related nonsense, flies over to "help" us (no less ). Because he is right and everyone else is wrong. All measurements done in the past hundred years, whether it is about the speed of light, distances between stars, or how long ago the dinosaurs lived... all of it is wrong wrong wrong.

But fear not. BestValue is right. And he has arrived to help us!

You're all forgetting that BestValue is working off three primary assumptions...

1. God exists.
2. He has revealed information to us about His creation in the Bible.
3. The Bible can be understood through a plain reading of the text.

It is perfectly possible that the earth is 6000 years old if these three things are true and

1. God wants to make it difficult to the point of impossibility for any sane person to believe that He exists.

Even if 1,2, and 3 are fair assumptions, 4 seems a little far-fetched to me. But God works in mysterious ways...

Hey, I don't think that is fair Cote.

"This is a very interesting thread! Can I just ask - do YEC believe that the universe is young too or just the earth/our solar system/our galaxy?"

Thanks, bumble. I hope I am partly responsible reason for that. I believe there are some of both but I think the majority believe the universe is young as well.

"In terms of evidence, I could point you to plenty of youtube videos as you have done but I suspect the you would find them as uncompelling as I find yours."

Probably not if it were made by a real scientist at a respectable conference like TED talks. On the other hand, if it were just some random person raving on a message board without providing evidence, you're probably right. (Oops! Did I say that out loud?)

"I've been liking but it seems to me that what you're saying best is that changing the basic assumptions through which you view evidence facts will support any theory. Which I agree with. However it means that given time and resources I can make a very good argument using facts to support the truth of pretty much any religion."

Yes, that is what I'm saying. However, I would argue that the Christian worldview is the ONLY one you can make a logically-consistent case for. (If there were another, I would switch to it immediately.) I know that's a radical claim but I think I can back it up. It would be off the topic of this thread, though, and more philosophical in nature. I like sticking to science.

"But if you really want something, this article explains why a decaying light speed theory is a ridiculous position to take."

Pedro, I think you mentioned before that I was clinging to the speed of light issue because, without it, my worldview crumbles. I'm actually not committed to it and prefer the gravitational time dilation theory. But in all honestly, I don't really give the distant starlight problem much thought. Perhaps I should. Incidentally, the big bang model has its own starlight problem. Google "The Horizon Problem."

"Please Best could you answer some of my points. If you believe light has slowed down so things are not as far away as we think. What kind of rate of slowdown do you think has occured. Why is this rate not continuing and if the furthest visible object away from us is actually only 6000 lightyears away from us why cant we see it bettter?"

Good questions, January. As I just wrote above, I am not committed to the speed of light slowing down. There is just good evidence that it is not a constant. And it's possible the rate of slow down IS continuing or that i is fluctuating. Watch the video I posted to see why. They fixed the sped of light by definition in 1972 so it could be slowing down and they wouldn't even know it.

No one says things are not as far away as we think. Young earth creationists believe those distances are real.

"I also find it interesting that unlike many scientists three is not one shred of unexplainable data in your theory. Nothing that you have to work around or account for that doesn't fit in nicely. This is not how I have seen other scientists work. There always seems too be some"rogue"or uncooperative data that has to be asterisked. Your theory is very tidy. More like a legal argument that a scientific one..."

Monster, if you're talking to me, I think I love you. That's pretty much how I see it too. And this is just the beginning. There are very few anomalies that this view does not explain - unlike secular science. :^)

"Those are called artificial diamonds. We are talking about diamonds that are formed in earth over hundreds of thousands of years, and frequently are over a billion years old."

Perhaps they call them "artificial" to retain the value of the ones they find so as not to destroy the entire jewellery industry. Just a theory. But similar things are going on in the pharmaceutical industry. I'm no conspiracy theorist, though.

"cote, I think the point they were making is that if it is possible to make diamonds in a lab in a few days/weeks then perhaps they don't take hundreds of thousands of years to form in the earth..."

Bingo, bumble. (Hey, that's cute.) :^)

"Laboratory conditions are artificial (obviously). In nature, diamonds take over a billion years to form."

I agree with you, Cote. Will you extend your analogy to abiogenesis? If they ever succeed in making life in the laboratory, I'll stand right there with you and say, "That doesn't prove it really happened that way on earth." (Except that if they really did make life in the lab, I would probably be intellectually honest, change my view and become an atheist.)

So if you think the world is only 6,000 years old, do you think dinosaurs didnt exist at all, or that they did exist, but at the same time as people? If they existed in biblical times, how come no-one mentions these absolutely massive animals that are wandering around the place?

"Unless, as I said, God is a trickster that has created the Earth 6000 years ago, with much older stuff already in it."

I wouldn't buy that God is a trickster. And I don't believe he created the earth with the diamonds already in them (although he has the power and the prerogative to do so). But the creation he made was mature. Adam was one day old on Day 7 but he could walk, talk and take care of himself. If we were to see Adam, we might think he was in his 20s. This doesn't make God a trickster because he told us what he did in his Word.

"unscientific question here, but reading the Torah, how does one arrive at the whole young earth thingy anyhow. Reading it in hebrew that is. I've never managed it. Does the latin/English translation change it somehow or do you need to read it as a young earther?"

Infamous, the original Hebrew indicates a literal six-day creation. I could give quotes and evidence if you're interested but it would be a lengthy answer and there are many other questions to get to as well.

I covered it here on national TV right near the beginning. (Saves me a lot of typing.)

Infamous, also here:

and here:

"I noticed you were getting somewhat hung up on this whole carbon dating issue, particularly around dinosaur bones etc."

Not really, Hemi. It is only one small part of the mass of evidence I've accumulated. Thank you for your detailed answer. I believe I have read a rebuttal to that and when I find it I might post it to get your response. It is something I will seriously consider however. Thanks again.