Is there any real, hard, cold evidence against creationism and a 6000+ year old Earth?

I know there are debates--arguments, really-- but is there really any evidence? Or at least some compelling ideas that don't have an equally compelling answer on the side of Creationism. If you answer yes, could you please tell me where I can research this for myself? Knowing that Carbon-14 dating is not reliable, what are these other dating methods and where can I learn about them? Thanks.

Is there any real, hard, cold evidence against creationism and a 6000+ year old Earth?
The Mesopotamians and Egyptians invented beer around 8000 years ago. The earth can't be younger than beer, can it?
Reply:There are mountains of evidence against creationism. They come from astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, paleontology, molecular biology and other sources.





Carbon 14 dating is useful for samples less than 50,000 years. However, there are other isotopic dating methods that are useful for time periods that are in the hundreds of millions to billions of years.





There is no physical evidence for a world that is 6000 years old. It is a myth. The important point is that creationism cannot claim evidence supporting a young earth by merely questioning the scientific evidence. This is a logical error called a false duality. Each theory must have supporting physical evidence, and the young earth has no supporting physical evidence, only arguments against what its supporters see as holes in the old earth argument. This, again, is very bad logic.
Reply:Just study sciences, and you will find overwhelming evidence against such a primitive and ignorant myth. Geology, paleontology, cosmology, biology, archaeology, astronomy, etc. all show that Genesis is a piece of bad fiction written by an ignorant shepherd. creationism has no compelling arguments. It is just bad science and pseudo-science that real scientists have refuted many times. I used to get 2 books on creationism and 2 on evolution and compare them. If you are objective, you should easily see in such comparisons that creationism is nonsense. At the library, I have seen a book about "Why Creationists Are Wrong". Look for it.Carbon-14 dating is only for items less than 50,000 yers old. There are several other radioactive elements used, and they all agree quite well about the age of the earth and its fossils.
Reply:You can present all the data you like, but it will fall on deaf ears. Creationists put all the geology, strata, fossils, Grand Canyons, down to the flood. It turned over everything, destroyed most life (fossils) and pushed up the mountains.





If you argue that this is physically impossible in the 6000 year timeframe, or impossible for a single flood event, they will simply come back with the “God can do anything” bit.





Probably the best evidence geologist have is taking the geological extreme – Everest. The summit of Everest is made of limestone that was formed from the shells of trillions of ocean creatures. For a flood event to push up the ocean bed to nearly 9 km above sea level, it would have to have been a gargantuan cataclysmic event. Tsunamis many kilometers high would have raged all over the world, and from all the other mountain ranges being pushed up at the same time. This would hardly be good sailing conditions for Noahs wooden boat, would it?





But even then, the creationists would argue that God protected Noah’s ark from the mayhem, which would make anyone wonder why he bothered to get Noah to build an ark in the first place. But they would say “to test his faith”.





Can’t win, I’m afraid. We just need to ignore them.
Reply:Christianity itself provides the best evidence; for the Earth to only be 6000 years old, the God of Christianity would have to be an evil Trickster God; He made the Grand Canyon LOOK as though water had been eroding it for tens of thousands of years; He hid fossils in rock strata, He magically endowed things with levels of carbon isotopes that made them appear to be hundreds of thousands of years old. If you "know" Carbon-dating to be unreliable, please pass on the details of this to the rest of us!





Creationism is pseudoscience, pure %26amp; simple, invented by people apparently willing to believe in a God smart enough to have made the world, the Universe %26amp; Everything, but not smart enough to done it through any elegant mechanisms....they prefer He just "waved a magic wand", like the Wizard of Oz!





You don't believe your God is an evil Trickster God, do you?
Reply:The most compelling evidence would have to be the fossilized remains of plants and animals that do not exist today or are mentioned in the Bible.


The only explaination would be the pre-biblical existance of the earth.


The Creationist theory falls apart when you try to find a definiton of what is "one day" for God.
Reply:Carbon dating is only really usueful over a few thousand years - that's not how rocks are dated.


We use Uranium-Lead, Strontium-Neodymium and other radioactive decays. We can use several to verify the answers, and they are much more reliable than C14 dating.





Every measure we have of the speed of light is consistent; and we can measure the distance to stars and galaxies in various different ways, and the light from even the closest galaxies takes more than 6000 years to reach us.





In addition to reading Geology textbooks, try astronomy textbooks to understand this.
Reply:Wow, people do get freekin' excited about this, don't they? One or two of 'em even wrote you a term paper! No references in the whole batch, tho, mine included.





Simple answer, No. It's not easy to develop "real hard cold (meaning 'scientific') evidence" AGAINST something, only FOR something.





And there are mountains of evidence FOR the preeminent scientific theories, that's why they are preeminent.
Reply:in gen 1:1 it says. in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth.in gen1:2 it says and the became formless and empty so between gen 1:1 and gen1:2 theirs a time gap. and the bible dose not say how long Adam and eve live in the garden it could have Bean thousands of years the bible says that in haven one day is a 1000.years on earth.
Reply:Yes. Oodles. Every science from chemistry, acrhaelogy, biology to physics shows the earth is MUCH older.





Pick up a geology textbook.
Reply:Jericho is older than 6000 years:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho
Reply:Intelligent Design on Trial ......


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/





Read the transcripts of the trial. That's all the evidence the jury and the judge needed.
Reply:Yes, there is lots of evidence of the age of Earth being about 4.5 billion years. This does not say that the Bible is untrue, but perhaps the interpretation of it. Consider this possibility: The Bible tells what God did, and Science tells how He did it. Also this:





2 Peter 3:8 "But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day."





The men who wrote the Bible would not have understood modern science. They could only write it as they understood it.


"The generally accepted age for the Earth and the rest of the solar system is about 4.55 billion years (plus or minus about 1%). This value is derived from several different lines of evidence.





Unfortunately, the age cannot be computed directly from material that is solely from the Earth. There is evidence that energy from the Earth's accumulation caused the surface to be molten. Further, the processes of erosion and crustal recycling have apparently destroyed all of the earliest surface.





The oldest rocks which have been found so far (on the Earth) date to about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years ago (by several radiometric dating methods). Some of these rocks are sedimentary, and include minerals which are themselves as old as 4.1 to 4.2 billion years. Rocks of this age are relatively rare, however rocks that are at least 3.5 billion years in age have been found on North America, Greenland, Australia, Africa, and Asia.





While these values do not compute an age for the Earth, they do establish a lower limit (the Earth must be at least as old as any formation on it). This lower limit is at least concordant with the independently derived figure of 4.55 billion years for the Earth's actual age.





The most direct means for calculating the Earth's age is a Pb/Pb isochron age, derived from samples of the Earth and meteorites. This involves measurement of three isotopes of lead (Pb-206, Pb-207, and either Pb-208 or Pb-204). A plot is constructed of Pb-206/Pb-204 versus Pb-207/Pb-204."





"So far scientists have not found a way to determine the exact age of the Earth directly from Earth rocks because Earth's oldest rocks have been recycled and destroyed by the process of plate tectonics. If there are any of Earth's primordial rocks left in their original state, they have not yet been found.


Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents. The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga) and the Isua Supracrustal rocks in West Greenland (3.7 to 3.8 Ga), but well-studied rocks nearly as old are also found in the Minnesota River Valley and northern Michigan (3.5-3.7 billion years), in Swaziland (3.4-3.5 billion years), and in Western Australia (3.4-3.6 billion years). [See Editor's Note.] These ancient rocks have been dated by a number of radiometric dating methods and the consistency of the results give scientists confidence that the ages are correct to within a few percent. An interesting feature of these ancient rocks is that they are not from any sort of "primordial crust" but are lava flows and sediments deposited in shallow water, an indication that Earth history began well before these rocks were deposited. In Western Australia, single zircon crystals found in younger sedimentary rocks have radiometric ages of as much as 4.3 billion years, making these tiny crystals the oldest materials to be found on Earth so far. The source rocks for these zircon crystals have not yet been found. The ages measured for Earth's oldest rocks and oldest crystals show that the Earth is at least 4.3 billion years in age but do not reveal the exact age of Earth's formation. The best age for the Earth (4.54 Ga) is based on old, presumed single-stage leads coupled with the Pb ratios in troilite from iron meteorites, specifically the Canyon Diablo meteorite. In addition, mineral grains (zircon) with U-Pb ages of 4.4 Ga have recently been reported from sedimentary rocks in west-central Australia.


The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of lead-207 to lead-206 changes over time owing to the decay of radioactive uranium-235 and uranium-238, respectively. Scientists have used this approach to determine the time required for the isotopes in the Earth's oldest lead ores, of which there are only a few, to evolve from its primordial composition, as measured in uranium-free phases of iron meteorites, to its compositions at the time these lead ores separated from their mantle reservoirs. These calculations result in an age for the Earth and meteorites, and hence the Solar System, of 4.54 billion years with an uncertainty of less than 1 percent. To be precise, this age represents the last time that lead isotopes were homogeneous througout the inner Solar System and the time that lead and uranium was incorporated into the solid bodies of the Solar System. The age of 4.54 billion years found for the Solar System and Earth is consistent with current calculations of 11 to 13 billion years for the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (based on the stage of evolution of globular cluster stars) and the age of 10 to 15 billion years for the age of the Universe (based on the recession of distant galaxies). For additional information on this subject, see G. Brent Dalrymple's The Age of the Earth, published by the Stanford University Press (Stanford, Calif.) in 1991."





Evolution


"The first step in demonstrating the truth of evolution is to make the claim that all living creatures must have a living parent. This point has been overwhelmingly established in the past century and a half, ever since the French scientist Louis Pasteur demonstrated how fermentation took place and thus laid to rest centuries of stories about beetles arising spontaneously out of dung or gut worms being miraculously produced from non-living material. There is absolutely no evidence for this ancient belief. Living creatures must come from other living creatures. It does no damage to this point to claim that life must have had some origin way back in time, perhaps in a chemical reaction of inorganic materials (in some primordial soup) or in some invasion from outer space. That may well be true. But what is clear is that any such origin for living things or living material must result in a very simple organism. There is no evidence whatsoever (except in science fiction like Frankenstein) that inorganic chemical processes can produce complex, multi-cellular living creatures (the recent experiments cloning sheep, of course, are based on living tissue from other sheep).





The second important point in the case for evolution is that some living creatures are very different from some others. This, I take it, is self-evident. Let me cite a common example: many animals have what we call an internal skeletal structure featuring a backbone and skull. We call these animals vertebrates. Most animals do not have these features (we call them invertebrates). The distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates is something no one who cares to look at samples of both can reasonably deny, and, so far as I am aware, no one hostile to evolution has ever denied a fact so apparent to anyone who observes the world for a few moments.





The final point in the case for evolution is this: simple animals and plants existed on earth long before more complex ones (invertebrate animals, for example, were around for a very long time before there were any vertebrates). Here again, the evidence from fossils is overwhelming. In the deepest rock layers, there are no signs of life. The first fossil remains are of very simple living things. As the strata get more recent, the variety and complexity of life increase (although not at a uniform rate). And no human fossils have ever been found except in the most superficial layers of the earth (e.g., battlefields, graveyards, flood deposits, and so on). In all the countless geological excavations and inspections (for example, of the Grand Canyon), no one has ever come up with a genuine fossil remnant which goes against this general principle (and it would only take one genuine find to overturn this principle).





Well, if we put these three points together, the rational case for evolution is air tight. If all living creatures must have a living parent, if living creatures are different, and if simpler forms were around before the more complex forms, then the more complex forms must have come from the simpler forms (e.g., vertebrates from invertebrates). There is simply no other way of dealing reasonably with the evidence we have. Of course, one might deny (as some do) that the layers of the earth represent a succession of very lengthy epochs and claim, for example, that the Grand Canyon was created in a matter of days, but this surely violates scientific observation and all known scientific processes as much as does the claim that, say, vertebrates just, well, appeared one day out of a spontaneous combination of chemicals.


To make the claim for the scientific truth of evolution in this way is to assert nothing about how it might occur. Darwin provides one answer (through natural selection), but others have been suggested, too (including some which see a divine agency at work in the transforming process). The above argument is intended, however, to demonstrate that the general principle of evolution is, given the scientific evidence, logically unassailable and that, thus, the concept is a law of nature as truly established as is, say, gravitation."





"Genome researchers at the University of Chicago have identified more than 700 regions in human DNA where apparently stron