Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.

Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:

1. god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
2. God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
3. God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
4. God creates the moon and sun and stars. This one seems out of order to me… maybe just the earth and solar system stabilize. I don’t know how plants exist without the sun, so maybe it’s microbes or something.
5. God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
6. God creates modern land animals, then creates man and woman. That makes sense, mankind is certainly new with only a few hundred thousand years of records before civilization starts.

That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.

This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

Also I’m amazed by how people don’t seem to understand what half-life is. It’s not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It’s the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.

So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.

Yes but this is a 16 year who watched a YouTube and owns noobs

Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.

The weirdest part to me is thinking the timeless omnipotent god that the Bible explicitly says considers a thousand years less than nothing actually literally meant that he created everything in what we’d perceive as 7 days when talking to whatever arbitrary scribe wrote down the creation myth for him.

I thought carbon dating of fossils was our best argument against the 4000 years myth.

Also, we could be way off on the age because we just don’t know. Sure, we can collect data and extrapolate for billions of years and assume that all elements have always decayed at the same rate, but short of living through it and accurately measuring it with modern instruments, molecules-to-man “macro” evolution can’t actually be proven.

This is why, using the Scientific Method, it is still a theory. A theory accepted by most scientists, but still. There’s a certain arrogance in declaring solved something we can’t actually know for 100% certainty.

That does explain why I can never get the hang of Thursdays

And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.

When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.

Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.

“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove

“It Is Useless To Attempt To Reason A Man Out Of A Thing He Was Never Reasoned Into.” - Jonathan Swift

It’s an ad hoc argument. You can’t argue against any ad hoc arguments with logic

I had a conversation with a woman who strongly believed God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith.

Some lead might have been created from supernova fusion, probably. I’m not actually sure if it’s the right isotope or if lead even has radioactive isotopes that we know of

Also, the half life is when half of it decays. Some of it is constantly decaying. We don’t need to wait for the half life to see any of it. The ratios would be totally off if there was enough of it to get the amount of lead we have right now, but some would exist. When the math is that complex, it’s not going to change anyone’s mind who believes what a magic book (written by regular humans) says. Nothing will, be if you want a chance it has to be something simple and obvious.

There are exactly 1.6 x 10^18 kilograms of lead on earth but every three minutes or so a brand new gram is welcomed into existence due to the radioactive decay of uranium.

Calculate that flat earthers!

We can’t prove that the world we live in wasn’t created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what’s worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.

We can’t know anything with 100% certainty. We can always imagine some razzle-dazzle, imagined scenario to counter the rational explanation if we like.

The point of the scientific method and logical reasoning is to pick the explanation with the most evidence.

The existence of a god is something that can’t be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.

It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.

Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I’ve been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I’m living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn’t true. I haven’t personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.

For someone who doesn’t want to believe, there’s really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam’s Razor.

How did the matter that constitutes the universe come into being? What was the single point that signifies the beginning of time? What set time in motion? Will time continue after the death of the universe?

None of it is worth trying to wrap our tiny little monkey brains around as far as I’m concerned. Go have a pint and listen to music that makes you happy.

you can also lead by example

Iron is the heaviest element capable of being created inside stars, via fusion. Once iron is fused, the star begins to rapidly collapse.

Elements heavier than iron (28) are the result of supernova explosions, which produce energies high enough to create these heavier atoms. It is further possible, as described in the image, for very heavy elements to decay into lighter more stable elements, those still being heavier than iron.

Lead is 82.

No. Nucleosynthesis of lead within stars generated from supernovae make up the bulk of the existing lead on Earth. Uranium decay does provide some additional lead inventory but would be fairly small in comparison.

But the presence of it in the first place within second generation stars proves that lead is billions of years old.

When supernovas explode they’re responsible for most exotic elements larger than iron. So it’s either that or radioactive decay.

No. God can produce as much lead as he wants. Duh!

Don’t give up, you can still change their mind.

Just from 4000 to 200.

Of course, the universe was actually created in 1970 and anyone claiming to be older than 54 is an agent of Microsoft sent to test your faith in Unix.

Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.

Last Thursday.

God created your with your memories as-is this morning when you woke up

I was also raised as a young earth creationist and it was always 6k years old for me but I could not begin to tell you why.

6,000 to 12,000 years old is what I heard. I’m guessing that this “Christians Against Science” page is a joke community that is making fun of YECs by saying it’s 4,000.

The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.

Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old

Yeah, it’s not at all a compelling argument.

Isn’t it more about being able the view the whole life cycle of lead, which takes more than 4000 years.

https://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html

Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.

Was going to say exactly that, not all lead came from radioactive decay. So this kind of ruins their debunk, Earth’s age has been measured by the amount of lead.

My farts are delicious thank you very much.

There are many scientists who are strict belivers. They just move the act of creation to the big bang and it’s still in gods plan.

But could he heat up a burrito so hot that even he could not eat it?

If not, that’s pretty weak. But if so, also pretty weak.

Ah the “Last Tuesday Hypothesis”.

Hehe bad faith

Counter handwave, any god that would do that is a jerk who doesn’t deserve worship. (Actually like 99% of the shit most faiths deities do falls into that category.)

“The devil put them there”

“God works in mysterious ways” /s

Which raises the question of why he would create a planet with the illusion of age and send you to hell for falling for his own trick.

I always found it funny how they’ll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say “oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they’ve been in the sky for a long time” but very often they just don’t have an answer because they didn’t think of one. Unfortunately, there’s almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to

Yeah, No amount of evidence will cut through the fog of wilful ignorance here.