[EternalVigilance]

Again, the only rate you can measure or observe is the current rate. It is not possible for you to go back in time to see if the rate was the same, or to go into the future and tell us what the rate will be. That’s why the claims of millions or billions of years are ludicrous. You just don’t have enough data points.

[allmendream]

Sure we do. We don't just have radio-atomic decay, but also the speed of light, geology, paleontology, and biology - the data from all of which show the ludicrousness of any suggestion that the Earth and the life on it (let alone the Universe itself) is only a few thousand years old.

The rates of atomic decay needed to fit those billions of years into a few thousand would fry the Earth.

Your CLAIM is that it is not possible to go back in time. We don't need to. We just need to assume that the constant rate we observe, a constant based upon the principles of the universe, is indeed constant (i.e. the ordered and predictable and rational universe that you reject). We can then TEST those assumptions, and darned if they don't lead to further data and discovery and useful predictions.

Meanwhile the idiotic suggestion that we cannot really know for sure, and thus shouldn't really even try, is an intellectual dead end leading absolutely nowhere.