[DittoJed2]

So in other words, you will believe the evidence you have seen regarding all of the things mentioned because it is too late for refuting evidence to make its way into your scope?

Here are some young earth evidences from Answers in Genesis:

1. Comets disintegrate too quickly.

According to evolutionary theory, comets are supposed to be the same age as the solar system, about five billion years. Yet each time a comet orbits close to the sun, it loses so much of its material that it could not survive much longer than about 100,000 years. Many comets have typical maximum ages (on this basis) of 10,000 years.(1)

Evolutionists explain this discrepancy by assuming that (a) comets come from an unobserved spherical 'Oort cloud' well beyond the orbit of Pluto, (b) improbable gravitational interactions with infrequently passing stars often knock comets into the solar system, and (c) other improbable interactions with planets slow down the incoming comets often enough to account for the hundreds of comets observed.(2) So far, none of these assumptions has been substantiated either by observations or realistic calculations.

Lately, there has been much talk of the 'Kuiper Belt', a disc of supposed comet sources lying in the plane of the solar system just outside the orbit of Pluto. Even if some bodies of ice exist in that location, they would not really solve the evolutionists' problem, since according to evolutionary theory the Kuiper Belt would quickly become exhausted if there were no Oort cloud to supply it.

2. Not enough mud on the sea floor.

Each year, water and winds erode about 25 billion tons of dirt and rock from the continents and deposit it in the ocean.(3) This material accumulates as loose sediment (i.e. mud) on the hard basaltic (lava-formed) rock of the ocean floor. The average depth of all the mud in the whole ocean, including the continental shelves, is less than 400 metres.(4)

The main way currently known to remove the mud from the ocean floor is by plate tectonic subduction. That is, sea floor slides slowly (a few cm/year) beneath the continents, taking some sediment with it. According to secular scientific literature, that process presently removes only one billion tons per year.(4) As far as anyone knows, the other 25 billion tons per year simply accumulate. At that rate, erosion would deposit the present amount of sediment in less than 12 million years.

Yet according to evolutionary theory, erosion and plate subduction have been going on as long as the oceans have existed, an alleged three billion years. If that were so, the rates above imply that the oceans would be massively choked with mud dozens of kilometres deep. An alternative (creationist) explanation is that erosion from the waters of the Genesis Flood running off the continents deposited the present amount of mud within a short time about 5000 years ago.

3. Not enough sodium in the sea.

Every year, rivers(5) and other sources dump over 450 million tons of sodium into the ocean. Only 27% of this sodium manages to get back out of the sea each year.(6,7) As far as anyone knows, the remainder simply accumulates in the ocean. If the sea had no sodium to start with, it would have accumulated its present amount in less than 42 million years at today's input and output rates.(7) This is much less than the evolutionary age of the ocean, three billion years. The usual reply to this discrepancy is that past sodium inputs must have been less and outputs greater. However, calculations which are as generous as possible to evolutionary scenarios still give a maximum age of only 62 million years.(7) Calculations(8) for many other sea water elements give much younger ages for the ocean.

4. Earth's magnetic field is decaying too fast.

The total energy stored in the Earth's magnetic field has steadily decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1,000 years.(9) Evolutionary theories explaining this rapid decrease, as well as how the Earth could have maintained its magnetic field for billions of years, are very complex and inadequate. A much better creationist theory exists. It is straightforward, based on sound physics, and explains many features of the field: its creation, rapid reversals during the Genesis Flood, surface intensity decreases and increases until the time of Christ, and a steady decay since then.(10) This theory matches paleomagnetic, historic, and present data.(11) The main result is that the field's total energy (not surface intensity) has always decayed at least as fast as now. At that rate the field could not be more than 10,000 years old.(12)

5. Many strata are too tightly bent.

In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time-scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.(13)

6. Injected sandstone shortens geologic 'ages'.

Strong geologic evidence(14) exists that the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone -- formed an alleged 500 million years ago -- of the Ute Pass Fault, west of Colorado Springs, was still unsolidified when it was extruded up to the surface during the uplift of the Rocky Mountains, allegedly 70 million years ago. It is very unlikely that the sandstone would not solidify during the supposed 430 million years it was underground. Instead, it is likely that the two geologic events were less than hundreds of years apart, thus greatly shortening the geologic time-scale.

7. Fossil radioactivity shortens geologic 'ages' to a few years.

Radiohalos are rings of color formed around microscopic bits of radioactive minerals in rock crystals. They are fossil evidence of radioactive decay.(15) 'Squashed' Polonium-210 radiohalos indicate that Jurassic, Triassic, and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were deposited within months of one another, not hundreds of millions of years apart as required by the conventional time-scale.(16) 'Orphan' Polonium-218 radiohalos, having no evidence of their mother elements, imply either instant creation or drastic changes in radioactivity decay rates.(17,18)

8. Helium in the wrong places.

All naturally occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the Earth's atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in five billion years.(19) This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age.

A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows that helium produced by radioactive decay in deep, hot rocks has not had time to escape. Though the rocks are supposed to be over one billion years old, their large helium retention suggests an age of only thousands of years.(20)

9. Not enough Stone Age skeletons.

Evolutionary anthropologists say that the Stone Age lasted for at least 100,000 years, during which time the world population of Neanderthal and Cro-magnon men was roughly constant, between one and 10 million. All that time they were burying their dead with artefacts.(21) By this scenario, they would have buried at least four billion bodies.(22) If the evolutionary time-scale is correct, buried bones should be able to last for much longer than 100,000 years, so many of the supposed four billion Stone Age skeletons should still be around (and certainly the buried artefacts). Yet only a few thousand have been found. This implies that the Stone Age was much shorter than evolutionists think, a few hundred years in many areas.

10. Agriculture is too recent.

The usual evolutionary picture has men existing as hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years during the Stone Age before discovering agriculture less than 10,000 years ago.(21) Yet the archaeological evidence shows that Stone Age men were as intelligent as we are. It is very improbable that none of the four billion people mentioned in item 10 should discover that plants grow from seeds. It is more likely that men were without agriculture less than a few hundred years after the Flood, if at all.(22)

11. History is too short.

According to evolutionists, Stone Age man existed for 100,000 years before beginning to make written records about 4,000-5,000 years ago. Prehistoric man built megalithic monuments, made beautiful cave paintings, and kept records of lunar phases.(23) Why would he wait a thousand centuries before using the same skills to record history? The biblical time-scale is much more likely.(22)

References

1. Steidl, P.F., 'Planets, comets, and asteroids', Design and Origins in Astronomy, G. Mulfinger, ed., Creation Research Society Books (1983), 5093 Williamsport Drive, Norcross, GA 30092, pp. 73-106.
2. Whipple, F.L., 'Background of modern comet theory', Nature 263 (2 September 1976), p. 15.
3. Gordeyev, V.V. et al, 'The average chemical composition of suspensions in the world's rivers and the supply of sediments to the ocean by streams', Dockl. Akad, Nauk. SSSR 238 (1980), p. 150.
4. Hay, W.W., et al, 'Mass/age distribution and composition of sediments on the ocean floor and the global rate of subduction', Journal of Geophysical Research, 93, No. B12 (10 December 1988), pp. 14,933-14,940.
5. Maybeck, M., 'Concentrations des eaux fluviales en elements majeurs et apports en solution aux oceans', Rev. de Geol. Dyn. Geogr. Phys. 21 (1979), p. 215.
6. Sayles, F.L. and Mangelsdorf, P.C., 'Cation-exchange characteristics of Amazon River suspended sediment and its reaction with seawater', Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 41 (1979), p. 767.
7. Austin, S.A. and Humphreys, D.R., 'The sea's missing salt: a dilemma for evolutionists', Proc. 2nd Internat. Conf. on Creationism, Vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1990) pp. 17-31. Address in ref. 12.
8. Austin, S.A., 'Evolution: the oceans say no!', ICR Impact, No. 8 (October 1973). Institute for Creation Research, address in ref. 2.
9. Merrill, R.T. and McElhinney, M.W., The Earth's Magnetic Field, Academic Press (1983), London, pp. 101-106.
10. Humphreys, D.R., 'Reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the Genesis flood', Proc. 1st Internat. Conf. on Creationism (Aug. 1986, Pittsburgh), Creation Science Fellowship (1987) 362 Ashland Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15228, Vol. II, pp. 113-126.
11. Coe, R.S., Prévot, M., and Camps, P., 'New evidence for extraordinary change of the geomagnetic field during a reversal', Nature 374 (20 April 1995), pp. 687-92.
12. Humphreys, D.R., 'Physical mechanism for reversals of the earth's magnetic field during the flood', Proc. 2nd Internat. Conf. on Creationism, Vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1990), pp. 129-142, address in ref. 12.
13. Austin, S.A. and Morris, J.D., 'Tight folds and clastic dikes as evidence for rapid deposition and deformation of two very thick stratigraphic sequences', Proc. 1st Internat. Conf. on Creationism, Vol. II, Creation Science Fellowship (1986), pp. 3-15, address in ref. 12.
14. ibid, pp. 11-12.
15. Gentry, R.V., 'Radioactive halos', Annual Review of Nuclear Science 23 (1973) pp. 347-362.
16. Gentry, R.V. et. al., 'Radiohalos in coalified wood: new evidence relating to time of uranium introduction and coalification', Science 194 (15 October 1976) pp. 315-318.
17. Gentry, R.V., 'Radiohalos in a Radiochronological and cosmological perspective', Science 184 (5 April 1974), pp. 62-66.
18. Gentry, R.V., Creation's Tiny Mystery, Earth Science Associates (1986), P.O. Box 12067, Knoxville, TN 37912-0067, pp. 23-37, 51-59, 61-62.
19. Vardiman, L., The Age of the Earth's Atmosphere: a study of the helium flux through the atmosphere, Institute for Creation Research (1990), P.O. Box 2667, El Cajon, CA 92021.
20. Gentry, R.V. et al, 'Differential helium retention in zircons: implications for nuclear waste management', Geophys. Res. Lett. 9, (October 1982), 1129-1130. See also ref. 20, pp. 169-170.
21. Deevey, E.S., 'The human population', Scientific American 203 (September 1960), pp. 194-204.
22. Marshak, A., 'Exploring the mind of Ice Age man', National Geographic 147 (January 1975), pp. 64-89.
23. Dritt, J.O., 'Man's earliest beginnings: discrepancies in the evolutionary timetable', Proc. 2nd Internat. Conf. on Creationism, Vol. I., Creation Science Fellowship (1990), pp. 73-78, address in ref. 12.

[VadeRetro]

Compared to what I mentioned, the deliberate AiG fallacies you post would not weigh an ounce even if they were legitimate arguments. They aren't. If no one has pounced on them before I get back to the machine in a few hours, I'll deal with them for the I-don't-know-how-many-eth time.

[StolarStorm]

Let's get to the really important issue, what do you think about outsourcing overseas?

[Aric2000]

ALL of those have been shown WRONG and have been thoroughly refuted by science.

I will let someone else deal with that post, because it has NOTHING in it that is in ANY way substantial, or scientific in it's conclusions.

THEY ARE ALL WRONG.

Reason that they are wrong.... because they have an answer and look for the evidence, then ignore the evidence that destroys those arguments that they found.

The arguments are there, but I do not have time to get into them right now.

We are getting ready for a 4 day camping trip, so Imust bid you good bye for a bit.

If I have time, and no one has refuted the post, I will take the time to do so.

Each of those arguments has been seen before, and each of them are strawmen, just waiting to be torn asunder.

[Right Wing Professor]

Let me answer just one of these (I don't have time to do all of them) and you'll see why you shouldn't trust web-pages of this sort.

The Careationist Web-page

All naturally occurring families of radioactive elements generate helium as they decay. If such decay took place for billions of years, as alleged by evolutionists, much helium should have found its way into the Earth's atmosphere. The rate of loss of helium from the atmosphere into space is calculable and small. Taking that loss into account, the atmosphere today has only 0.05% of the amount of helium it would have accumulated in five billion years.(19) This means the atmosphere is much younger than the alleged evolutionary age.

What scientists actually say.

Helium escape from the terrestrial atmosphere: the ion outflow mechanism. Lie-Svendsen, Oe.; Rees, M. H. Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, Kjeller, Norway. Journal of Geophysical Research, [Space Physics] (1996), 101(A2), 2435-43.

Abstract: Global He+ escape fluxes have been computed for a range and a variety of diurnal, seasonal, universal time, and solar activity geophys. conditions. The short-term variables are averaged and the globally averaged escape flux is computed for a range of cutoff latitudes, which sep. regions of open and closed field lines, during one solar cycle. The global escape flux averaged over a solar cycle was computed, and shows that a cutoff latitude of approx. 60° or lower is sufficient to balance the outgassing from the Earth's crust.

[ThinkPlease]

Here are some young earth evidences from Answers in Genesis:

And here is a point by point refutation many of the items of the list from Answers in Genesis: The Meritt Faq

[VadeRetro]

As I suspected, some of the plumper targets have been sniped at, so I'll pick some remainders. Give AiG credit, they seem to have been trying to find some new stump-the-dummies material.

Before I start in, here's a good by-the-numbers treatment of the standard stuff. Comets are number 3. The magnetic field is number 11. Helium is 14. Mud is 21. Salt is 24. History is number 28. I recommend a thorough read of the whole thing, however.

To business (what is left of it), then!

2. Not enough mud on the sea floor.

I know, I already said "Mud is 21." But I want to add something.

Like the salt and helium arguments, the mud arguments ignores that the substance being surveyed does not stay around. At least, mud does not stay mud forever. Under pressure, muds of different sorts turn into sedimentary rocks of different sorts, mostly shales.

5. Many strata are too tightly bent. I don't remember seeing this one before, so I'll amuse myself by guessing the gimmick rather than looking for a refutation researched by a real scientist. You see, it's always a Stump-the-Dummies gimmick with these things.

I think the gimmick is that the speed of bending probably influences whether or not a seemingly brittle object cracks under bending forces. Let's get the whole text of that one.

In many mountainous areas, strata thousands of feet thick are bent and folded into hairpin shapes. The conventional geologic time-scale says these formations were deeply buried and solidified for hundreds of millions of years before they were bent. Yet the folding occurred without cracking, with radii so small that the entire formation had to be still wet and unsolidified when the bending occurred. This implies that the folding occurred less than thousands of years after deposition.

It isn't just the degree of bending being cited as the problem, it's the lack of cracks. But I assume the AiG-ers are modeling the crack/non-crack behavior of the strata based upon the bending occurring over some very short interval.

Why does your camera's shutter spring get "tired" if you put it away in the cocked position for two years? (That is, when you take it out and try to take pictures, the spring doesn't move the shutter fast enough for the marked exposure times anymore.)

The molecules adjust themselves slowly, under pressure. You can almost think of the spring re-hardening into a new position. Many substances exhibit a slow but observable molecular memory as they "adjust" to a certain physical relationship. By doing this, they slowly bleed and dissipate physical pressures on them.

That's without wondering about at what temperature the particular strata were metamorphosed. I suspect AiG assumes a cold process, but most metamorphosing is done under pressure and heat with a lot of time involved.

6. Injected sandstone shortens geologic 'ages'.

A big deal is made over the ability of a sandstone layer to intrude into another layer. Here's another creation-oriented site that treats the alleged problem in more detail: Clastic Dykes.

From that site:

One series of dikes of special interest to one seeking to determine the age of sediments in the earth is found in the Front Range of Colorado north of Pikes Peak (Gross 1894, Roy 1946, Vitanage 1954, Harms 1965). In this case, sand from the Cambrian Sawatch sandstone has intruded into the Precambrian Pikes Peak granite during the Laramide Orogeny. This orogeny is the main uplift forming the Rocky Mountains which occurred relatively late in geologic time. There is disagreement as to whether the intrusions forming these dikes are from below or from above; in this case the time discrepancy is so great that this point makes little difference. The sandstone dikes contain fragments from the Permian-Pennsylvanian Fountain Formation, indicating that at least this formation was present at the time of intrusion. On a geologic time scale this represents a period of at least 250 million years during which the Sawatch sandstone remained uncemented. This seems especially unusual since just above the Sawatch are several carbonate layers that could provide an abundant source of cement for the Sawatch. If, as field evidence indicates, intrusion took place during the Laramide Orogeny, the Sawatch sandstone would have had to remain uncemented for more than 400 million years. On the other hand, if, as expected, dikes are formed at approximately the same time as their host rock, or at least the cracking of the host rock during the Laramide Orogeny in the Pikes Peak granite case, then there must not be much time difference between the Cambrian and the Laramide Orogeny which supposedly occurred more than 400 million years later!

I have highlighted the section which says that there is uncertainty whether the Cambrian sandstone intruded into the Precambrian granite from below or above. It's supposedly unimportant, but since it's almost like asking whether or not the Precambrian was before or after the Cambrian, let's clear it up.

This photo shows the Cambrian Sawatch Sandstone overlying the Precambrian Pikes Peak Granite. Like the unconformity near the bottom of the Grand Canyon or in the Tetons or near Ogden, Utah, this one consists of Cambrian sandstone overlying Precambrian igneous or metamorphic rock. Its difference is that here, the sandstone was deposited slightly later in the Cambrian than in the other places mentioned. It is younger because the shoreline was moving eastward as the ocean transgressed. By the same reasoning, we can guess that the Cambrian sandstone above the unconformity in Wisconsin is even younger. It is.

A Website on the Unconformity.

So we see that the sandstone lies over the granite whose cracks it intrudes, which makes sense since a quick check confirms that the Cambrian is still considered later than the Precambrian.

Now, let's go back to the issue of bending and cracking. We have a granite layer that was brittle enough to develop cracks during mountain-building. We have a sandstone layer which was "somehow" viscous enough to flow in to fill the cracks.

I don't know about you, but I can see why real geology is not agonizing over this one. Either the sandstone is "hardened" or it isn't. But even a "cemented" sandstone will seem viscous compared to the highly crystalline and rather solid granite. At any event, the sandstone overlies the granite and is much younger. If the underlying granite cracks, the sandstone isn't going to float on nothing, especially under the kind of pressures involved.

[Ichneumon]

Here are some young earth evidences from Answers in Genesis:

As I'm sure you've noticed by now, these "crevo" discussions tend to fly all over the place, hitting on dozens of topics without really resolving any because not enough time is spent on any one thing.

So I've got a proposal for you: How about if we spend some time focusing specifically on the "young earth evidences" you've just presented? We'll all examine them in depth, and see if we can come to some agreements about whether they really hold up or not when scrutinized, and why. During the process I hope you may learn some things about how scientists validate or invalidate certain arguments, and how evidence is evaluated.

Also, would you be willing to accept the idea that if (repeat, if) all or most of your evidences can be shown to be based on misconceptions or invalid reasoning, then perhaps creationist sources might not be as reliable or as good at science as you currently believe? In other words, may these be used as a "quality check" for creationist (or at least AiG) arguments, in the same way that if you randomly sample products off an assembly line and they all test successfully, it gives confidence that the rest of the production run are likely to be good too, whereas if the random samples fail the quality checks, it implies that something's probably wrong with most or all of the rest of the batch?