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Comment by kloop | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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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.

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