Geological Sciences v. YEC/Flood Geology

There's scientific consensus that evolution has occured, is occuring and will continue to occur as long as life exists on this planet.

Instead of consensus, maybe I should have said a Bose-Einstein condensate of scientists.

"There's scientific consesus by cosmologists that the universe is 13.7 billion years old with a margin of error of less than 1%."

I doubt this. There are some real problems getting all the way back to the beginning and with the relatively new discovery of quintessence, we could see a Universe that started much earlier. Recently I have heard ages ranging from 12 to 15 billion years, with a few working on expansion models that would place the beginning at about 20 billion years ago.

Age of the Earth is one thing - quite a bit of precision on that one. Age of the Universe is a whole lot tougher.

According to NASA the universe is 13.7 billion years old, if time began at the Big Bang.

I wasn't arguing that 13.7 billion years old was a bad number - just that saying the margin of error on this number is less than 1% was a little bit of a stretch. Don't over-state the precision. We have very good evidence to support a 13.7 billion year age, but that evidence is no where near accurate enough to ensure a less than 1% error margin - especially considering that there are forces at work that we barely understand (e.g. quintessence and other potential forces that we are not even aware (always a possibility).

If the cosmic microwave background radiation came from the Big Bang, its age can be measured rather precisely:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap030217.html

"The above universe age is estimated to be accurate to better than 0.2 billion years." - That's an error of about 1.5% or so, not too bad.

From NASA's original press release on the new WMAP satellite:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0212073539.htm

"...the new portrait precisely pegs the age of the Universe at 13.7 billion years old, with a remarkably small one percent margin of error."

From the data we have now, the margin of error is around 1% or so. Any unknown forces would fall into the realm of uncertainty, which cannot be calculated or figured on.

I think we might be getting a little distracted from the main point of Mechanical Bliss's post. There is a clear consensus that the earth is about 4.5 billion years old. There has been a consensus that the earth is far more than 10,000 years old and that there was no recent global flood for nearly two hundred years. The consensus on the old earth and no global flood was reached by Christian geologists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Nothing has arisen from the world of science to dispute this consensus. It has been strongly reinforced by research results spanning nearly two centuries.

There is no dispute from the world of science. The only dispute is from the world of a very specific religious belief. The questions that were raised threads linked in the first post of this thread have NO answer by YEC. Attempts like the one referred to in the recent "varves" thread all rely on distortions of the data and key facts are left out. They amount to total distortions of reality that go far beyond mere interpretation.

The Frumious Bandersnatch

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Bumped for the recent influx of YECists.

The same arguments keep coming up...

In any case, there are 12 features in the Grand Canyon that have yet to be addressed by YECs, there are varves, radiometric dating, etc. There are plenty of topics from the opening post that are valid points of discussion that clearly falsify young earth creationism and the global flooding model as the mechanim for creating earth's geologic features.

Young Earth/global flood claims abound, and yet still no response to the points fatal to their position.