Why should we believe that the same institutions that still can't figure out where the Earth's oceans came from (among countless other features and phenomena), have also irrefutably demonstrated that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.
Only recently has the geologic community rejected uniformitarianism as an unjustified limitation on scientific inquiry into Earth's history, as it constrains past geologic rates and conditions to those of the present. After bitterly resisting the widespread evidence of past earth catastrophe, geologists finally came around to realizing their prior assumptions were wrong.
So why can't today's evolutionists and old-earth believers accept the possibility that radioactive decay rates may have been different in the past as well? Why must the radioactive uniformitarian assumption to be removed from questioning? Why is this particular uniformitarian assumption regarded as a sanctified truth of the universe?
One knee-jerk response might be "because different data agree with each other" ... but that is simply not true. There are countless features or phenomena in the universe that do NOT agree with conventional age estimates and these are simply explained away as unreliable, or when all explanation fails.... anomalous.
Now for a question I think the evolutionists know the answer to, whether they want to admit it or not:
IF radiometric dating methods generally returned ages that could not possibly accomodate the time required for an evolutionary narrative, would you accept it as a disproof of Evolution (universal common descent).... OR... would you simply assume that the dating method is unreliable? (due to past fluctuations in decay rates, contamination, or some other anomaly)
Are you doing this very thing for any phenomena that might demonstrate evidence of a younger earth/solar system, etc. ? (e.g. when we find original undecayed protein in dinosaur fossils, or likewise discovering features of a planet in our solar system which should have decayed a long, long time ago if the body were that old)
(substantive responses only please. If all you have is emotional hand-waving or a snide flippant comment then please just move along)