Briefly, as a geologist with published research in paleontology, I just wanted a briefly touch on two items above.
The first being the following statement:
"It deals with history, which is not subject to investigation by experimentation."
Some might say that geology deals with earth history and therefore is not subject to experimentation. But in actuality, the rocks of today, and observation of them, do allow us to understand the past with use of experimentation.
And I'll give an analogy.
The study of mountains for example, in geology, is actually very similar to studying vehicle collisions.
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Imagine if there are vehicles smashed against one another. And you can see this. This is kind of how geologists look at mountains.
And the physics and chemistry of how a car breaks when it collides, is similar to chemistry and physics of how mountains and rocks break and collide.
And just as someone can use a model to reverse engineer a car that is broken, you can actually do the same with mountains.
And when it comes to testing, rocks break in very specific ways. Pull them apart and they break at high angles (60 degrees) in a normal fault Horst/graben fashion. Press them together and they break at low angles (30 degree) and tend to ride on top of one another.
Certain rocks also only form at certain temperatures. Some rocks only form at literally several hundred degrees while others only form at extremely high pressures (like having the weight of a mountain on top of it).
Rocks also have brittle and ductile points of change/failure. Just like a plastic ruler, you can bend it only so much before it fails, and if you put a ruler in an oven, it can bend much more before failing. Rocks work the same way, and by examining how much rocks have bent, broken or were heated, we can further discern details about their history.
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And so, we can actually do many experiments looking at things like: this is how these rocks break, this is their melting point, this is the angle they're fractured at and this is the direction they have moved (and continue to move at), and with that, we can actually use experiments to understand the past.
Just as we can run experiments on car parts and can see: here is the temperature that car parts melt at here are the angles that they're broken, here are temperatures that they formed at.
We can even look at things like fossil foot tracks to determine what direction was historically "up". Which can tell exactly how certain rocks turned or flipped, and we can collectively use this information to "rewind time" to reconstruct geologic historical events with extremely high precision.
Obviously we can also look at fossils to learn a lot. Find a field of 50 plus dinosaur nests and burrows and it becomes quite clear that a passage of time occurred at the particular layer being observed. And it isn't hard to replay history of nest building or burrowing in your head.
And there is just one other item I wanted to comment on:
"In ''Evolution: A Theory in Crisis,'' for example, Michael Denton methodically analyzes a wealth of evidence that challenges this theory. "
Michael Denton actually isn't a paleontologist and his works on paleontology are actually quite limited in the extent of information he provides, particularly in the book noted above. I suppose the same goes for anatomy. You're much better off reading books written by paleontologists on the topic, such as Donald Prothero, Neil Shubin, or Spencer G. Lucas.
Ultimately what I am trying to say is that, a time machine isn't necessary to understand what happened in the past. A time machine would help with murder forensic investigations, but it's not actually mandatory to conduct testing and investigation and to come to a conclusion about how past events occurred. Especially in cases where evidence for who committed the crime is overwhelming.
As geologists, we are very confident in our understanding of what we see. Very confident both in an ancient earth an in the fossil succession, to the extent that we would simply refer to it as "certainty". Just as we are certain that rocks are hard and pillows are soft, or that water freezes at 0 degrees, or that aluminum crumbles when squeezed. We know what we see and what we see is very clear.
So then we are left with this burning question. How does this "appearance" of an ancient earth fit in with scripture? Is the appearance false, like a veil pulled over our eyes? Was earth created to look old, like a trick? Or do we need to investigate our interpretation of the early chapters of the book of Genesis?
