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Comment by Tangurena2 | Hacker News Reader

> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old

Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.

> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.

While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher

Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.

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>Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes.

Well, if one ascribes to this God thing, of course Earth could just as well be created 6000 years ago, with exactly the shape and vintage material properties to appear to us as it does now.

If you can create a baby Earth from nothing, you can also just create a middle-aged Earth from nothing.

I don't believe that a benevolent God would create bones in the ground to trick millions of scientists into falsely believing in the existence of dinosaurs.

Like seriously, every creationist who goes with this argument really compromises on the benevolence leg of our understanding of God. Like God is some kind of trickster being who leads atheists astray on purpose or something.

You might enjoy reading the concept of the demiurge [1]: A lesser creating-but-not-creator deity than the ultimate benevolent god, usually portrayed as something of a deceptive character. Great rabbit hole to go down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge

I know it's pretty dubious if anything could be considered a true infohazard, but Gnosticism is up there in the running. I was warned, and it is indeed a hard mindset to shake regardless of low priors.

It's a fun rabbit hole indeed.

All in all, it IMO just sets up the importance of the Council of Nicaea as well as the development of the Nicene creed.

The benevolent God gave athiests something to entertain themselves with until they find faith.

So Coyote fooled all of us by becoming God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

Right. And to take it a step further, it might have been created 3 seconds ago, with memories included :).

And i might be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating all of this after a paticle cloud over hundreds of billions of years of random interactions by chance happened to condenced into thinking substance out of the chaos.

As far as I can tell, this whole experience/reality was created the moment I became conscious of it!

Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.

For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.

> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist

This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

And thus, the creator having being able to create anything at any point, yet our world having no proof of that happening, leads you to the only logical answer: either a book of abrahamic folk tales is the fundamental law of the universe, or it’s just a book.

> because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator

An omnipotent creator that creates lies? What else should we disbelieve from that Prince of Lies? How can we tell that now that invisible sky daddy is telling the truth this time? What about last time? Are we going to see some giant PSYCH! written in the sky?

Or Next Tuesdayism: the universe will be created next Tuesday. Your current sense of experiencing reality is merely the fabricated memory which will have existed after the universe gets created.

Thanks for this. You unintentionally gave me some acute Douglas Adams deja-vu. It sounds exactly like something he would’ve written.

Falsifyability is the key difference between a religious vs scientific claim.

The idea behind YEC is that God created a world which is visibly, quantifiably, and measurably 6000 years old. According to this, scientists, in their hubris, failed to see what was right in front of them, and were led astray. It’s imperative that the earth NOT appear to be older than 6000 years, because if God put forth evidence that it was that old, then he did so for a reason, and we should treat it as being that old.

This line of thinking necessarily throws out any formal systems of reasoning humans have adopted. E.g. belief in a divine creator gives little reason to believe that Newton's First Law is eternally consistent if an omnipotent being could change the "rules of the physics" at any point.

It's not even a proper argument if you think about it, because you are essentially positing logic/reasoning aren't sufficient to comprehend the reality we live in.

Creationism does not want to say "magic" and admit that God is intentionally trying to deceive people. So that's why some of these responses seem silly. I mean they are, but only because the pro-creationism arguments are silly.

Yet, carbon 14 dating is one of the “gotcha” reasons that they’ll try to argue an old earth is impossible. It’s not a good faith argument from them generally though.

So our Earth was created with supposedly fake proofs that it’s much older than it really is, with no physical proof whatsoever that it is this young. A young age I might add that basically means half of civilization’s history never happened, and more than two thirds of our species’ existence.

Why? The book itself gives no reasoning or exact age for when Earth started, yet we have to believe it is fact that someone misreading that book has the exact pure date?

> Why? The book itself gives no reasoning or exact age for when Earth started, yet we have to believe it is fact that someone misreading that book has the exact pure date?

Young earth creationism is predicated on the idea that every word in the Bible is literal fact (no exceptions), so you can “calculate” the age of the earth by the genealogy accounts of ancestry from Adam to Jesus. It falls apart at any reasonable scrutiny, but like you said, it’s not rational thinking. It’s dogma for a certain group of people.

Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.

And yet if you ask many a young earth creationist about the dome in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, they will have no idea what you’re talking about¹ because they insist on literal interpretations of a text that they didn’t make it through the first page of.

⸻

1. Based on firsthand experience.

>Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.

Not such a good argument either. They're way ahead of you: "The lord moves in mysterious ways" and all that.

This is, of course, going to vary. There is a wide spectrum of Christian fundamentalists and related conspiracy theorists who believe in Young-Earth Creationism. Some of them are not only perfectly happy to state that God put partially-decayed elements and dinosaur bones there to test their faith; they will declare with enthusiasm that the fact that you believed in them means you failed, and are going to hell!

Others will come up with reasons why those things aren't actually what they appear to be, including but not limited to the ones who declare the entire scientific establishment to be a grand conspiracy to discredit the One True Faith.

Still others will just breeze on past it, ignoring things that they cannot understand.

You ignored the "[SIC]" notation in order to pretend you are correcting the person you responded to.

You're "Well, ackshually..."ing, without even adding a correction. Yay.

Not a YEC, but you, the sentient being made in God's image, don't join a MineCraft world that is still a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface.

-4004 earth not found?

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