[dan1123]

Wow, such a bitter materialist idealist. I don’t get frustrated with people who have philosophical differences with me, but I do like to point out to people that there are such things as philosophical underpinnings to things they take for granted. While facts tell a certain part of the story, the philosophical underpinnings cause people to interpret them one way or another. The best first step is to understand what your philosophical biases are and recognize that these are not facts.

[ahayes]

Bitter? I'm not bitter, but you certainly seem to be. I'm kind of flummoxed by being a materialist idealist. I'll have to think about what exactly that might be. I don't think I've been an idealist since I was three.

I've seen the "philosophical underpinnings" from both sides. As a young-earth creationist I found that those underpinnings were secured embarrassingly poorly. You say both sides have the facts and the differences are in the interpretation. Why, then, is it impossible to find scholarly articles explaining the whole of the natural evidence from a young earth creationist viewpoint? Creationists can't even determine among themselves which strata were laid down by the Flood and which are post-Flood, and that's a rather critical point.

I discovered years ago as a creationist that creationism is not about examining the evidence and drawing conclusions from it. It's about concluding creationism based on faith, ignoring the evidence, and then attempting to poke holes in the theory of evolution as if debunking that would leave young earth creationism as the only alternative (it wouldn't).

There are as many lines of evidence as there are journal articles all pointing towards a universe about 13.7 billion years old with our solar system being 4.5 billion years old, life originating on earth over 3 billion years ago, metazoans (multicellular organisms) appearing about 600 million years ago, tetrapods colonizing land 365 million years ago, the sauropsids (leading to reptiles) and therapsids (leading to mammals) diverging about 340 million years ago, mammals appearing about 220 million years ago, primates 60 million years ago, apes diverging 25 million years ago, the human line diverging from the chimpanzee line between 5 and 7 million years ago, and anatomically modern humans appearing 130,000 years ago.

From an old earth, evolutionary perspective evidence from astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology make perfect sense and repeatedly corroborate each other. From a young earth perspective none of this evidence lines up, explaining creation "scientists"' failure to provide a cohesive model of the history of the earth.

For some examples of evidence that young earth creationism cannot address:

• When magma seeps up from the earth and solidifies, paramagnetic atoms oriented with the earth's magnetic field are trapped in their original orientation. From examining continental plates and these magnetic lines we know that the earth's magnetic field has oscillated repeatedly every few tens to thousands or millions of years. We can use these records on the continental plates to cross-reference contemporary magnetic records and plot the positions of the continental plates over geological time. Creationism would suggest that during the Flood (when these strata were supposedly laid down) the earth's magnetic field oscillated wildly, reversing rapidly many times. Creationism can't make sense of the orientation of magnetic field lines in different layers of rock and can't cross-reference these to plot the movement of continental plates.
• As long as we're talking about continental plates, many fragments of continental plates that are known to have been in contact because of their magnetic record also align well with the types of rock layers present, occurring in the same order and with similar thicknesses. This is a second line of evidence corroborating the magnetic data and indicating continental plates drift over long periods of time. Creationism can't do anything but suggest that the plates cruised to their present positions over a matter of months during the Flood, in spite of the fact that this would have destroyed all life due to the heat flow into the ocean from exposed mantle and massive volcanism.
• The orderly progression of fossil types did not escape scientists even before the theory of evolution was formulated. In centuries past scientists put forth successive creationist models, with God creating one type of life, then after a time destroying it and replacing it with one more advanced. Many of these men were sincere Christians, and the evidence did not lead them to the conclusion that the first two chapters of Genesis are a literal account. Creationism cannot explain why some organisms are never found together in spite of occupying similar habitats.
• Radioisotopes decay with known half-lives. We can observe "fossil" decay in light from supernovas. The spectra produced corroborate constant decay rates billions of years into the past. When a sample is radiometrically dated different dating methods, as long as appropriate for the age and type of material tested, produce corroborating ages. Creationism cannot deal with anything dated over 6,000 years old, and thus creationists have had to provide various challenges to radiometric dating (which, once again, do not support their model, but just try to poke holes in the physicists' model) such as suggesting decay rates are nonconstant in spite of the evidence, and in spite of the fact that decay rates proposed would have cooked the newly created earth.
• Returning to fossil sorting, microfossils are tiny fossils that should not sort appreciably. In spite of this, we have sea cores holding fossils of Foraminifera going back millions of years and showing greater complexity of the test (shell) evolving over time. This falls completely in line with what evolution would suggest, but creationism cannot explain how the Flood waters managed to sort such tiny fossils so meticulously. And, of course, the creationists don't even try.
• Most strata are assumed by creationists to have been laid down during the Flood. Among these strata are layers of lava from volcanic eruptions. During the Flood these would have been extruded into water and should have formed characteristic pillow lavas. Instead, we have many layers of volcanic rock that have characteristics of lava laid down on dry land.
• There are fossils that indicate organisms were going about their normal lives during the supposed time of the Flood. Layers of coal hold animal trackways and vertical stumps, sometimes with the roots attached and twining through undisturbed coal. In the Joggins Fossil Cliffs multiple hollow lycopod stumps have been found to contain fossils of primitive amphibians and reptiles that used the stumps for shelter--in strata supposedly laid down during the middle of the Flood. In Triassic strata fossils of the dicynodont Diictodon have been found curled up in their helical riverbank burrows after flash floods drowned and buried them. Creationists are unable to explain how these animals managed to dig burrows when they should have been underwater and the only substrate present should have been liquified mud.

And let's consider some other odd features of young earth creationism. Most creationists think that God made two animals of each kind, usually interpreted as genera, and then these evolved (!!) to produce all living organisms over a period of 4000-6000 years. This would require rates of evolution much faster than any evolutionist would suggest. So why do historical records not show new species popping into existence every few centuries? And why has this runaway creationist evolution apparently stopped? Then also creationists tend to think that only extant creatures would have to have been preserved on the ark, plus some that have gone extinct in the past 4000 years. In actuality 80% of the mammal genera that have ever lived are extinct. Major groups have come and gone--primitive tetrapods, primitive synapsids, primitive archosaurs, dinosaurs (with the exception of birds), all but two genera of monotremes, most of the marsupials, many placental mammals, and others. And that's just the tetrapods, which I am admittedly biased towards. Pull out a paleontology book--there will be placental mammals in it that you won't even recognize. Supposedly representatives of all of these genera were present at Creation, most lost at the Flood (goodbye dinosaurs (-birds)--not one creationist can explain why they all died off), others dying off in whole clades after the Flood--in between evolving at breakneck speed. The creationist God is massively incompetent. Creationists object to the process of evolution as wasteful, but the evolution of metazoans took place over the last half-billion plus years, and the creationist God managed to burn through the majority of all of the metazoans he ever made in only 6,000 years. Ouch.

These are just a few of the dilemmas that creationism is unable to address. Once I realized the complete lack of corroborating evidence I abandoned young earth creationism and determined God must have used evolution over billions of years to make living organisms.

I'll now leave you so you can adjust your underpinnings in privacy.