I just returned from the National Apologetics Conference. I wanted to thank you for mentioning it as it was the catalyst for 3 families to fly down from Toronto with our teenage kids to attend the conference. I attended both your sessions and enjoyed both of them. Several of us were disappointed that the second one was cut short and wished you had more time. Our kids enjoyed it and were challenged and strengthened in their faith.

Thanks again – Paul.

You have correctly noted a very important distinction within young earth creationism. There are those who believe that God made it look old, and therefore that scientific evidence for great age, even if 100%, is a deception sent from God. I personally have theological difficulty with this position.

There are others, which are sometimes called scientific creationists, who believe that one should play by the rules of science, at least except for the requirement made by many scientists that God cannot intervene in nature, and that when we do, eventually we will discover that the evidence points to a short age. I am much more comfortable with this approach.

Scientific creationists can be argued with. Sometimes they (we) let their prejudices get the better of them (a common failing among scientists). But in principle, at least, they can be argued with, and thank you for defending us against BarryA in that regard (I like BarryA; I just think he is partly wrong here).

I will tty to point out another subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) set of differences within the ranks of what are commonly (but slightly inaccurately) called YEC’s. Some believe the entire universe was created a few thousand years ago. These are most properly called young universe creationists (sometimes YUC’s). Some believe that only the earth, or only the solar system were included during creation week. These would be YEC’s but not YUC’s. And some believe that only the surface and atmosphere of the earth were remodeled during creation week. These might be called young life on earth creationists, or YLEC’s or sometimes YLC’s. All of them believe that the Phanerozoic strata are only a few thousand years old, and are at least theoretically vulnerable to evidence of an old age for geologic strata. But only YUC’s are troubled by an old age for galaxies.

I personally have migrated from being a YLEC to being a YEC. I still see the scientific evidence for a young universe to be very weak, and the evidence for an old universe to be very strong, and so, while I am open to YUC arguments, I presently do not believe in YUC.

So when you point out (91) the evidence of colliding galaxies, I agree with you. It is one of the reasons why I am not YUC. Unless and until there is a theory about, for example, the decreasing speed of light that can make correct predictions about physical phenomena that are not expected from more standard models, I am prepared to live with the more standard models.

Some of your other examples deal more directly with the age of life on earth, although here the arguments are somewhat weaker. Specifically, there is a reasonable explanation of ice cores from a short-age perspective. Layers in salt mines may not (probably do not) correlate with yearly intervals. Continental drift may have been more rapid in the past than it is now. Arguments regarding the cooling rate of the earth assume (a) that this information is relevant to the age of life on earth, and (b) that the earth started out as originally molten, neither of which assumptions would be valid from a short-age perspective.

However, to be perfectly fair, with my present knowledge your argument regarding the salt mine layers has some weight, as do your arguments from atolls. I do see them partly counterbalanced by such things as evidence from the erosion of mountains, for example Everest, that we discussed before, by paraconformities, and also by the fact that material up to supposedly 350 million years old still usually has detectable traces of carbon-14, which has a half-life of only 5,730 years. Those, especially the latter two, seem to me to be pretty powerful arguments for a short age at least for life on earth.

I offer that more in a spirit of learning from each other than from dogmatism. I can actually be taught. Finally, while we may at present disagree in our assessment of where the truth probably lies, we may still agree that the universe shows, and features within the universe show, highly probable evidences of design, and may unite on that. In the meantime our agreement on this principle should not be interpreted as unanimity on “creationism”, and I will be happy to point that out to those who try to charge you with being a “creationist”.

I think we are conflating two things that aren’t necessarily the same – young earth creationism and scientific creationism. Scientific creationism doesn’t argue that God made it look old. They argue that mainstream science has it all wrong and they detail how and why. They play by rules of science but the hypotheses they concoct are possible but unlikely taken one at a time and taken as a whole become ridiculous. On the other hand someone who says God created the universe in place with the appearance of age aren’t making a scientific argument, they’re just pointing out that it’s possible without offering any evidence or justification other than revelation. I won’t argue the latter but arguing the former can be productive as everyone stands to learn a bit from the other. Scientific creationists who I know put a lot of earnest effort into their explanations. I think it’s a futile undertaking but I respect the earnest effort and willingness to engage science on its own terms in the effort.

I don’t have a problem with in-place creation of a world that merely looks old. Anything is possible for an omnipotent creator. God could have set up the stage then put the players on it of course. The problem I have is when people think they’ve found flaws in the props that reveal it’s just staged to look old. The depth and breadth of contrived hypotheses explaining away the myriad contrary observations are collectively ludicrous. If God wanted the universe to have a consistent appearance of being very old He did a perfect job of it. One shouldn’t expect any less than perfection. It seems rather a dimunition of omnipotence to suggest otherwise.

Now here’s the kicker. God, being God, can create a universe that appears to us to have great age if He wants to. Thus, this YEC argument cannot be refuted in principle.

I do not see how the two sides on this will ever come together and, therefore, the point of discussing it.

The best positive evidence of either an old universe is a Hubble photograph of a large galaxy that was hit by a smaller galaxy. It sent out a shockwave like a pebble hitting a puddle. The speed of the shockwave is easily calculated and so is the diameter within small enough margin of error to yield a time interval from initial impact to current diameter of the shockwave – a hundred million years. Plus the galaxy itself is millions of lightyears distant so we couldn’t even see that galaxy if there hadn’t been hundreds of millinos of years for the light to get here.

It isn’t that there’s just one bit of evidence like this pointing to an old earth, there are a million layers of annual snow deposition in arctic ice cores, there are a million layers of salt deposition in a US saltmine near the great lakes. Speed of continental drift is easily measured and there’s no doubt S.America and Africa were once a single continent and they took millions of years to drift apart where they are today. The earth’s beginning is well enough modeled that we know it was molten and had to cool down for tens of millions of years before liquid water could exist. The list of things congruent with an old earth are truly legion and come from virtually every natural science.

Thanks. I still have some questions about the comparative rapidity of erosion of shield and cinder cone volcanoes, and suspect that catastrophic processes can erode faster than normal processes, but should not comment further on this without specific information about the composition and geography of the various islands. Your reference has given me some food for thought.

jerry, (89)

Your proposal is a reasonable one. It may be a little long, and you may wish to shorten it. I wish it would help, and if it did I would be delighted. However, as I noted, experience suggests that it will be ignored.

What is wrong and what should be added are some of the critical comments I am looking for. I may end of as the lone ranger on this but I believe something similar is necessary for ID in order to explain itself to the uninformed masses and the people at Panda’s Thumb and many as ASA are not the target. It is the people I meet every day who are well educated and know nothing about ID except what is said in the press that are my target. If in the process scientists learn more about what ID is really about, it precludes them from making wrong assertions without the opportunity to show them they are misleading.

Here is a rewrite of my points given Paul’s comments

The core belief that defines ID is that there is evidence for some kind of intelligence that is capable of creating and instantiating design in the physical universe, based on the similarity of certain features of nature to known designed artifacts and processes and the absence of any reasonable model of their occurrence by non-designed processes. ID does not insist that any investigation must stop looking for non-designed processes as causes only that intelligent input be a possible inference. We believe that in certain cases it is the best inference but that this may be superseded by future findings.

This core principle is compatible with a wide variety of other beliefs and some of these belief systems have adopted this core principle as an essential element of their belief system. This does not mean that ID endorses these belief systems. Just as capitalism and socialism both espouse certain common engineering principles, different belief systems have adopted intelligent design principles.

ID as a science accepts only good science and insists that only good science be considered when addressing scientific issues:

Relevant to evolution which is the topic here, ID accepts that

The earth is approximately 4.6 billion years old and the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years. The necessary ingredients for life were created by cosmological processes that slowly produced the various higher order elements over the last 8-10 billion years.

Life on earth began about 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

Evolution which is the arrival of new and distinct species as evidenced by the fossil record as well as minor modifications of current species has happened over the last 3.5 million years and there are periods when this phenomena of new specie origins has been rapid and times when it has been slow. The fact of evolution does not imply any mechanism or rationale for the appearance of any new species.
Life has progressed since 3.5 billion years ago showing a pattern to species of greater complexity sometimes with great changes happening in relatively short time periods such as 5-10 million years and sometimes with few changes over much longer periods of time.

The number of cell types of animals has been increasing since the origin of multi-cellular organisms about 800 million years ago with over two hundred cell types currently in many living mammals. Along with this increase in cell types there has been an increase in complexity of the functions which the organisms can accomplish.

The driving force for most of the diversity of life on the planet seems to be due to Darwinian processes. Darwin’s original ideas have been considerably changed since Darwin’s time but the theory today generally hypothesizes that the appearance of new minor variation in species is driven by environmental factors but modified by a whole host of genetic and epigenetic processes that tend to produce gradual changes in species over time. However, this process has never been to shown to be able to produce new complex functional capabilities but only minor changes probably creating at best a new genera. We remain skeptical of its ability to completely explain what Ernst Mayr called megaevolution.

However, the mechanism by which new variation appears in the populations of the species on the earth that lead to new complex functional capabilities is at this time mostly unknown. We recognize that there is much speculation on this topic but at present all that is available is mainly speculation. While the traditional Darwinian processes can very often explain changes once these complex functional capabilities arrives, it cannot explain the origin of capabilities.

In other words using an old saying, “Darwinian processes can explain the survival of the fittest but not the arrival of the fittest.”

The concept of common descent or universal common descent is not a given but may have happened. It is not an essential part of evolutionary biology but a possible conclusion from the evidence which is still to be debated. ID does not dispute the analysis that many species with common genomic elements probably resulted from these species having a common ancestor and that most of differences of these species are due to micro evolutionary processes. This is an area of debate to be resolved through future research.

Thus, the evolutionary debate is mainly about the mechanism for the development of new complex functional capabilities and secondarily about how fast some of these complex functional capabilities can permeate a population once they arrive.
The resort to “deep time” as an explanation is not a valid scientific concept and used mainly to cover up inadequacies of the current evolutionary paradigm.

It is also grossly inappropriate to argue that we are “creationists” without further defining that term. We are not young earth creationists though we are aware that many young earth creationists often use intelligent design to justify their beliefs just as socialists and capitalists use efficiency arguments to justify their distribution systems. There are fundamental differences between us, and specifically arguments that are dependent on a young age creationist reading of the book of Genesis or a young age of the earth are irrelevant for our position and should be recognized as such. We are not experts on young earth creationism nor the bible and because of this no questions about religious beliefs should be asked because we in reality are not able to answer them correctly. Those who espouse intelligent design are of various religious and non religious backgrounds.