Regarding “dating” anything via heavy rare earths or light rare earths or carbon-14 or fossils or anything else ...
How does one make the case that a Supreme Being that created the entire Universe couldn’t have created it at any arbitrary time with ratios of various isotopes of various elements calibrated to make it appear to be any age He wanted it to?
I seriously doubt that the Creator would have created the entire Universe to be one gigantic lie, as He does not lie.
I do NOT post every article I could ever find from different creationist orgs.
However, when there are articles from someone like Vern Cupps
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22vr+cupps%22+radiation&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C32
... who writes articles from the expereince of his entire career, I try to pay attention to what he has to say.
(1) Such a case is impossible to make because it is both non-provable and non-disprovable. It is entirely possible, assuming nothing about the nature of a creator, to imagine a creator who would put together a universe that would appear older than it really is.
(2) Assuming the creator of the universe is the Judeo-Christian God of Genesis, we have aspects of that God revealed to us through both scripture (special revelation) and creation itself (general revelation). The God of the bible abhors falsehood. A creation that is deliberately set up to appear older than it really is would be dishonest.
(3) The dishonesty/deception point does not, however, completely resolve the issue. Some passages suggest that God does deceive — the deception of Ahab is an example that troubled even John Calvin: 1 Kings 22:20-22 20 And the LORD said, ‘Who will entice Ahab into attacking Ramoth Gilead and going to his death there?’ “One suggested this, and another that. 21 Finally, a spirit came forward, stood before the LORD and said, ‘I will entice him.’ 22 “ ‘By what means?’ the LORD asked. “ ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouths of all his prophets,’ he said. “ ‘You will succeed in enticing him,’ said the LORD. ‘Go and do it.’” There is an apologetic that suggests that God merely allows us to be deceived about the nature of the world as a mechanism for separating the faithful from the unfaithful. I don’t buy it, but there is an argument.
(4) The ICR types provide a valuable challenge to settled ways of thinking about secular creationism. The problem is that any evidence of an earth older than 6000 years undercuts their positions. For me, ice cores showing at least 30,000 years of clear annual layering and up to 60,000 years of possible separations between older annual layers suggest that the earth is old and we should understand that young earth accounts are interpreting the Genesis creation stories incorrectly. Radiometric dating might do it for others.
(5) Ultimately, the point of science is to better understand God’s creation. If the ICR folks can create a coherent cosmology that adequately models the world in a manner superior to the OE models, or even one that works just as well, then more power to them. But the model actually has to work coherently within creation as we actually observe it, not as we wish it were. It follows from this point that even if God created the world 6000 years ago over a literal 24 hour period but made it look really really old, to understand the world as it is we have to use models that comport with an Old Earth theory. If that is true, then it follows that a better understanding of creation is actually leading us away from the truth and therefore away from the nature of God.
“How does one make the case that a Supreme Being that created the entire Universe couldn’t have created it at any arbitrary time with ratios of various isotopes of various elements calibrated to make it appear to be any age He wanted it to?”
Fairly simply. The Creator’s Universe was created with certain physical laws which are observable. When looking into the heavens the sky is a window looking far back into time like some kind of time machine. We can therefore observe how a physical law operated in many different and distant past events as well as current events where we are at now. There are certain inherent characteristics of matter which are reliant on the passage of great periods of time, and not all of them are reliant upon radiometric and isochronic methods of determination. Speculation that the Universe was created to give the false appearance of “deep time” fail for a wide variety of reasons, one of which is the simple fact that once the alleged false evidence began to operate, it too became subject to the physical laws seen to operate throughout the observable Universe. In order for the false evidence to appear valid upon arrival on the Earth, that same false evidence would have impacts at other locations we can observe at different times, and we can easily observe that they do not in fact do so. This is observable in a great many ways down to the spin momentum of certain sub-atomic particles of different ages and origin. So the conjectured fake image of the Universe is ruled out by the observation of the physical properties we can witness right here and right now as well as in the distant and past observable Universe.
Yes, the first ‘day’ of God’s might not have been 24 hours...