A friend 1 <> wrote:

>>Still hanging onto a young earth?

Friend 2:

> Yes as a matter of fact. 🙂

Friend 3:

This response indicates to me that [our friend] is either not reading my responses, or is so locked into a young earth that he genuinely can’t deal honestly with the problems.

In the young earth thread, I gave a short response, and a long response.

My short response assented to three assumptions presented by [our friend], but I explicitly stated that ANY short answer to the questions would have been misleading.

My longer response pointed out why a “true” response assenting to the assumptions was misleading.

The “assumptions” of science are never just “assumed”. The assumptions of a method are a concise statement of the conditions under which the method works. They are a plain statement of potential problems, or of what needs to be checked or justified to make results meaningful.

The assumptions of radiometric dating are checked, exhaustively, in any way possible. There are some individual dates for which no sensible check is possible on one or more assumptions; in this case that one date is always subject to question, and if there is any particular reason to doubt the assumptions, then the result is generally not useful.

In other cases, all assumptions can be checked by multiple means, and the results can thus be trusted with considerable confidence.

I also pointed out cases where some of the assumptions were not required, and gave pointers to literature explaining how other assumptions are established in their turn.

To be blunt, [our friend] is stuck in a medieval world view.

This is not a necessary consequence of Christian faith — but Christian faith is notoriously susceptible to this failing. This is part of why the church is certainly not good at seeking out truth. It is in the position of believing by faith that it has found truth: and this frequently leads to enormous resistance to critical testing of the purported truths.

There are many instances where the church has actively defended falsehoods despite plain evidence, and has fought a long a ultimately futile battle against truth.

The Orthodox church, to its credit, is not particularly active in trying to maintain a view of geology which was disproven over 200 years ago; but individual clerics — like [our friend] — are a different matter.

Does it bother him that the source he was using is plainly misleading? That Taylor lies (by ignorance, or by moral turpitude, I cannot say) about the evidence? That Taylor rips quotes from context to misrepresent the quoted source? [our friend] stated confidently that there is scientific evidence for a young Earth (about 10 thousand years or less). On what basis did he claim this? Was it comprehension of the evidence in question? No way! I am positive [our friend] merely parroted Taylor on this supposed evidence.

Taylor, however, is passing on falsehoods. There is no such evidence. All the purported lines of evidence are no such thing. Either the actual data they use is not actually the case, or else the model for interpreting the data is wholly unsupported speculation. In no case is there a remotely plausible model and honestly presented data which together consistutes evidence for a young Earth. One or two of the purported evidences may have been valid (but misleading)

as example of evidence twenty or more years ago; but have long since been resolved to show the errors in the model, or the data.

People may believe in a young Earth for various reasons. If they believe it by virtue of trust in some revelation despite the empirical methods of science, that is fine. Naive, but honest. If they believe it because of a scientifically founded critique of 200 years of accumlated geological evidence; or because of some empirically based “scientific” argument, then they are not merely naive. That position is always and in every case one of monumental incompetance in their comprehension or handling of the empirical data and methods.

Believe in a young Earth if you will. But if you think I simply “assent” to Taylor’s tissue of deceptions on assumptions, you can’t have read my longer response on the matter with any level of comprehension.

Cheers