Alas, Creationism is pseudo-science based on egregious misunderstanding of how ancient texts such as the Bible were read in antiquity. The "young earth" date supported by Creationists was not even part of Christian theology until Bishop Ussher (1581-1656) attempted to use the Bible and other historical information to work back to the date of Creation in a way that was actually scientific for his period. Science, however, has progressed significantly in the past 400 years, and the evidence of everything from geology through radioactive decay and Doppler shifts of distant astronomical objects through the fossil record suggest that the universe is some 15 billion years old and the earth some 5 billion years old. 

How does creationism scientifically support their claim that the earth is only 10,000 years old?

What genuine scientific evidence can creationists provide to support their Young Earth Creation theory?

How do they disprove all the contradicting theories created by generations of scientists studying physics and chemistry (especially dating methods), geology, astronomy, cosmology, molecular biology, oceanography, genomics, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology and any other fields of science that have developed theories or made claims incompatible with the Young Earth version of world history.

Is it right that science should disregard their claims as dishonest pseudoscience?

 

Read the Bible. thats enough evidence.

With all due respect, I have a rather large collection of books as old as, or older than, the Bible. I have, for example, several excellent Chinese texts of the Canon of Changes, (Yijing), perhaps the oldest book in Chinese culture and one of the oldest in the world. Its contents are not consistent with the Bible. Why should I believe one old book instead of another?

Because Christians have a record of worldly success? Well, so does China -- it's the oldest continuous civilization in the history of the world, and the source of a multitude of discoveries and inventions that have enriched human culture. It certainly doesn't look like a place that's been deprived of something essential, even though the "good word" didn't reach it for nearly a thousand years after the times of Jesus, and remains a minority and eccentric taste there.

This leads to another point. I read Classical Chinese, and have had to grapple with translation problems many times. It is impossible to completely express the meanings given in one language with the words of another, no matter how hard one tries. And yet, of all the Christians who have told me how important the Bible is, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number who have bothered to learn Hebrew and Greek to read their "sacred" texts in the original languages. I really have to doubt the sincerity of any Christian who can't be bothered to make a relatively modest effort to understand his or her "word of God" better. There are a multitude of excellent resources for anyone who wishes to learn Hebrew and New Testament Greek -- and after all, you only have to learn to read them, not to write or to speak. Why are Christians so reluctant to make this effort if the Bible is so important?

I have been told that Muslims do not really approve of the translation of the Quran into any other language than the Arabic it was written in, since that was the way Allah delivered it to humankind. If that is true, I at least have to give them points for consistency.

I didn't put Sunderland on the list of books for you, look at the post. Yeah, you have to be careful with him, and I didn't think you were qualified to tiptoe through that minefield.  The German and French books are available in translation.

I didn't give you an extensive list. Do you really want to jump right into the really hardcore science stuff? You don't really seem ready for it. You seem to be ignoring everything I actually say and responding to something in your own head. Good luck with that.

Well, about 6500 years ago is as far as we have human observations recorded.  Before that we may make good guesses, but... Look at neolithic cave paintings. We don't really know for certain why they were done or what they were for. Art, amusement, magic, religion? But we can extrapolate from what we know of primitive cultures discovered during the historic period. Likewise we can use what we know of gamma radiation, x-rays, various light spectra, etc. to study things we don't know about the universe. I never said they were unreliable. We're pretty sure about the Big Bang. We can even estimate (!) when, although our estimate changes as we learn more. The how exactly this came about and the why we have no clue.  But that is what science is about- to try to find out everything.

I did not say modern geology doesn't exist, I studied it in college, I have three friends who are geologists. But the idealized Geo. Column as it exists in textbooks, with each layer in its exact order and every layer from bottom to top in a complete order as in the book, simply has never been found.  One of my friends is a professor, one works for Union Carbide and one for Royal Dutch Shell.  They've all told me that- so did my professor back in the Jurassic when I was a sophomore.

And please don't try to convince me you're not smart, I've been around highly intelligent people my whole life. I know the warning signs! Here's a few books to start with. Some are pro-evolution; they still haven't convinced me but I appreciate their clarity about the general problems and their forthrightness in addressing them. I'm sure you're intelligent enough to find plenty more on your own. If you don't read the languages they are available in translations (or they were).

Collin Patterson, the Listener ;

Salet, Hasard et al, Certitude: le Transformisme devant la Biologie Actuelle;

Stephen Jay Gould, the Panda's Thumb;

H. Nielson, Synthetische Artbilding.

Politics has sadly always been influencing both science and religion.  Perhaps the most commonly recognized controversy was with Galileo and the Church.  Facts may change; Truths do not.  We live in an expanding Universe (anyone debating that?) and that implies certain physical laws.  In whatever system of facts we observe and choose to define our sense of existence,  and the more consistent those facts are with each other, the clearer our understanding and knowledge.  These may shift, but no new system can be valid if it does not consistently incorporate the old system, either by extending it or explaining its anomalies.  Physics has undergone 2 revolutions in 400 years -- Newton was right, until Einstein proved him wrong.  But Newton is still right at "normal" speeds.

If there are religious objections to science, so be it.  But those religious objections cannot dismiss science without proof.  Claiming faith is not evidence in a scientific model.

The further we wander from being objective, the more we attempt to camouflage and pass off political agendas as verifiable scientific fact, masquerading as intelligent thought, the more impassioned we insist "facts" be accepted alongside their proven brethren without critical analysis and consistent proof, the quicker we run down the road to the Dark Ages.

How many angels dance on the head of a pin?

Whatever the answer, it's not science.

Believers in creationism are not interested in scientific facts, or have their own sets of facts.  I spoke with one who believed that the Grand Canyon was not formed over time, but all at once by an earthquake or some other phenomenon that made more sense to him than it did to me.  The point is that their faith based knowledge is more important to them than scientific based evidence, and no amount of discussion will change that.  As long as they live according to their beliefs, I imagine that it's fine.

  There is evidence that the Grand Canyon formed relatively quickly in either an Ice Dam failure or a Lava Dam failure. Some sections of the Grand Canyon may not be more than 700,000 years old.

There is a great deal of speculation regarding the formation of the Grand Canyon.  There is evidence of  "scouring"  on the walls of the canyon which typically occurs during "great floods". (http://www.sentex.net/~tcc/scabland.html)

As an interesting aside, the fossilized trees found in the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest National Park do not have roots that are part of that "flora" system.  The trees were washed into that area from somewhere else. All of the tree roots were broken off.  I learned this on a visit to the location from one of the park rangers. (http://www.petrified.forest.national-park.com/info.htm)

Another interesting aside is the recent eruption of Mt. St. Helens and the immediate flooding of Spirit Lake. One can see from the way the logs have begun to fall apart and drop down into the bottom of the lake that it is quickly possible that coal and other fossil fuels were buried rather quickly in the aftermath of the cataclysmic events post-eruption.   This might account for the problems found by geologists in the geologic layers of the earth.  Creationists say that the layers formed in Spirit Lake after the eruption of Mt. St. Helens occurred over days rather than over years.  They claim that Mt. St. Helens would serve as a model for "the Great Flood" of Noah's time. (http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/mshduring.html)

The point is that if we weren't there at the time, we can't prove how a thing was made unless we can create a model or a similar cataclysmic event that mimics something from the past.

Everything all of you have said is interesting and excellent.  Let's look a little more closely at some of it.

We don't know the age of the universe or our planet, but it seems obvious it's very ancient.  We don't know anything for sure prior to about 6500 BC, but we can make inferences based on geology, etc. and about the age of the universe through a variety of techniques developed by scientists.  But these do not nail down anything definitively- we just believe these are good estimates based on what we do know.

As far as hominid fossils go, if you look closely into this field you will find that about half of the scientists who have examined every fossil say it is a hominid.  About half say each is a fossil of ape bones.  Even "Lucy" is believed by about half the scientists who have examined it to be the remains of an extinct type of chimpanzee.  We still don't know FOR SURE, which is the eventual aim of all this research.  We should keep in mind Piltdown Man, considered absolute proof of evolution for over sixty years until one scientist noted the fossil was a pig's tooth.

As for geology, the "Geologic Column" is fascinating as a theory, but it does not actually exist anywhere in the world.  You can find sites where you can follow the Cambrian Period to the next, etc., but there is nowhere at which the entire Column is accurate.  There are sites everywhere in which these layers are in completely different order or many are nonexistent, and these cannot be accounted for by earth movement and other normal factors.  The fact that academic geologists usually say these are all "anomolies" and yet their Column does not actually exist seems to put theory above fact.  I encourage you to check out the geologic researches at Mt. St. Helens, which show enormous holes in many of geology's current theories, and which are carried out by mainstream scientists.

The theory of evolution does not state simply that species change, change form, that genetics and mutation are involved, and that the process is driven by natural selection.  All those things are proven and quite true, but the theory of evolution does not stop there.  Evolution is a complete theory of change, and states that all things in the universe (everything, no exceptions, stars, planets, species, human languages, literally EVERYTHING) change in three ways:

1. from more random to less random;

2) from less integrated to more;

3) from less complex to more complex.

Now, we know that species change, and we know a great deal about how and why.  But everything we know about biology, genetics, somatic mutation, aging, and all the physical processes of the universe tells us that everything changes in the opposite manner from the theory.  Perhaps it's time to adjust the theory, or come up with a new term?  We could just use the term "evolution" in its popular sense, synonymous with the word "change."  Then the theory of evolution would be correct.  As it stands now, it is seriously flawed.

I won't even start on the theory of biogenesis, which is central to the current theory of evolution.  I'll just say that everything we know tells us it is impossible for something alive to "evolve" from something not alive, and that no theory ever expounded for biogenesis has any support.  We've been reduced to imagining that "life" came to earth from somewhere else, on a comet or something, with no proof.  There are, if you look, hundreds of books out there by scientists (many not Christian, some are atheists) who use nothing but hard science to disprove the theories of evolution and biogenesis.  You're all intelligent people, you can find these.

We must find an alternative theory if we want to keep on the track of the truth.  Either we need to, as above, restate the theories or come up with something new.  That's science-  theories come and go as we learn more.  It is unscientific to be emotionally attached to Creationism; it is as unscientific to be emotionally attached  (and poltically and financially) to evolutionary theory as it now exists.  We need to remove politics from both religion and science, but given human nature that's not going to happen.

And, frizzyperm, I absolutely agree with your post #7.  Christian or not, there is NO denying that!  Ha!

Elfgirl, . . . a victim of a lie?!?  Hahahahaha!!!  At what point in my post, did you see that I actually "believed" what I heard on the website?!? 

All I said was that it was "interesting."  Period. 

In all of my years, I had NEVER heard anyone trying to prove creationism through science up until that point.  Relaying what I have heard doesn't mean that I subscribe to it.  As I said before, I am more of the bent of mind that there are simply things on this earth we are not meant to understand (until we leave it).  I absolutely refuse to pick sides. 

There is no need for abrasion, as the early years of college life tends to breed.  For the record, your answer is just as "interesting" to me. 

Believers in creationism are not interested in scientific facts, or have their own sets of facts.  I spoke with one who believed that the Grand Canyon was not formed over time, but all at once by an earthquake or some other phenomenon that made more sense to him than it did to me.  The point is that their faith based knowledge is more important to them than scientific based evidence, and no amount of discussion will change that.  As long as they live according to their beliefs, I imagine that it's fine.

Quite honestly, until recently, I had never really heard of any scientific evidence supporting creationism.  (Not that I'm a fanatic about either theory.  I am more of the bent of mind that there are simply things on this earth we are not meant to understand until we leave it.)  A few months ago, though, I heard the first bit of evidence for creationism and, for what it's worth, it was VERY interesting to me. 

The story is kind of a funny one.  I heard Kirk Cameron interviewed on a television show and I thought it would be fun, just for kicks, to go to the website he mentioned.  (I did this knowing I was a Roman Catholic and knowing that I haven never been nor ever will be persuaded from my faith.)  Heck, I had a crush on Kirk in high school and watched Growing Pains religiously, . . . what would this hurt, eh?  Anyway, their little video had something very interesting to say (amid the pleading calls to join their church, that is).  Kirk & Friends basically said that we are always shown the typical evolution of man as evolving from almost all-fours to an upright homo sapien on two legs (the man of today).  It is usually shown as a series of seven or eight figures, each evolving to a more upright position.  Most everyone has seen this.  Well, their point was that, if evolution were true, there would be thousands, . . . even millions of fossilized specimens of every single point in the process.  But THERE ISN'T EVEN ONE.  The only one ever discovered was used to create that series of pictures, . . . and was later shown to be a hoax (so they said).  Anyway, as a basically objective observer with ties to both sides, I just thought that was VERY interesting.  The lack of ANY great numbers of fossils recording human evolution.  Interesting!!!  You can read it for yourself on http://www.wayofthemaster.com/, for what it's worth.  It would be interesting to hear your reply.