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Hypothetical: Creationism becomes standard in science classes

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Ken Behrens

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Are you saying, and proposing to teach, that Aristarchus and Seleucus were wrong in thinking that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and that in fact the Sun revolves around the Earth?
No, I would teach that different people see different things, and question why this is so, and how we can determine the truth for ourselves.
 
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Bugeyedcreepy

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In the same way the curvature of earth affects the route taken by an airplane coming here; if not allowed for by selecting the great circle route, the trip takes longer. Or perhaps the negative of that, depending on the location and curvature of the bend.

Suppositions is indeed the magic word. And it is how scientists create their picture of the past as well. We just keep supposing until we get a satisfying combination. Theory is as much about satisfying as it is about observation.
Unless you're into last Thursdayism, Science doesn't indulge in suppositions, aside necessary axioms of existence.
I am not opposed to the current scientific theories. I am only opposed to the proclamation that they are proven facts.
....Okay, I call Furphy on you being a professor. Surely, even a Mathematics professor would know that science is never proven fact.
Let me change the focus of the question: Can you find one application useful to us today where the age of the earth, the sky, or the nature of physical forces 6000 years ago would make a difference?
Aside life, the following: Oil prospecting (and for that matter, growing the immense amount of biological matter required to cause its existence in the first place). Mining, particularly of uranium. Atmospheric deposits in Ice cores.
I'll give you the theory. We simply create a analogy to a complex pole (on a map from R3 to R3 in 6 dimensional space, rather than complex 4 d space) in-between us and the star in question. We can scale the diameter of disruption to smooth R3 created by the pole as desired, in order so that, as we approach the point at infinity, the two sides of the intersection of the path and the asymptote to infinity come within the Planck constant distance at precisely 1/2 the length travelled by light (at its agreed on speed) in the time we desire to delay the light.
All of which requires systematic interference on a cosmic scale of space between us and the lightsource, which incidentally would also require that interference to be particular to specific branches of light being lensed to us, and none other. Sure, if you're doing that in an electrical engineering lab, but this principle simply wouldn't apply itself in the depths of space without leaving dirty great skidmarks of evidential observations all over space. I'd love to see your reasoning why anyone would accept such an absurd idea with lensed light across the cosmos?
 
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bhsmte

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Let's say that the courts rule that Christian creationism is a valid subject to teach in science classes in public schools, in addition to (or in place of) the ToE. (With the current administration, such a possibility isn't so far-fetched anymore).

The big question then, of course, will be what version of creationism? If it's going to be taught as a scientific subject, the course material has to be standardized. So what should schools teach?

Young Earth Creationism?
Old Earth Creationism?
Day-Age Creationism?
Gap Theory Creationism?
Progressive Creationism?
'Embedded Age' Creationism?
'Past State' Creationism?
Intelligent Design Creationism?
Theistic Evolution (which, as certain people are fond of pointing out, is technically a form of creationism)?
Another alternative?

In all the time I've been on these forums, I've rarely seen two people agree on a single creation model. But if you want to teach it in public schools, you're going to have to. And how can you be so sure that your particular flavor of creationism will end up being the one chosen?

I would imagine, the battle between the different factions of Christianity, would be even more intense than the battle creationists have with those who agree with evolution.
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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The ancients were just as sure the sun went around the earth.

Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

The ancients were just as sure the earth was only a few thousand years old.

Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

The ancients were just as sure each species was created separately.

Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

Do you know why the conclusions were reached, on these subjects, that they were wrong?
 
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Paul of Eugene OR

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There are many suppositions required in the first for the theory to work. Any supposition might be changed, and then other options might occur.

Unless time is also bent.

Sorry, your notions are without substance. For one thing, you haven't specified a consistent way to do what you propose, anyway, which means you are engaging in rank speculation without evidence. For another thing, you dishonor God the Creator by claiming He arranged things to deceive us when we start checking the evidence. For a third thing, you fail to understand how consistently the whole picture of the cosmos revealed through modern science all hangs together in a consistent way. One has to doubt one's lying eyes to go in your direction here.
 
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Ken Behrens

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Unless you're into last Thursdayism, Science doesn't indulge in suppositions, aside necessary axioms of existence.

....Okay, I call Furphy on you being a professor. Surely, even a Mathematics professor would know that science is never proven fact.

Aside life, the following: Oil prospecting (and for that matter, growing the immense amount of biological matter required to cause its existence in the first place). Mining, particularly of uranium. Atmospheric deposits in Ice cores.

All of which requires systematic interference on a cosmic scale of space between us and the lightsource, which incidentally would also require that interference to be particular to specific branches of light being lensed to us, and none other. Sure, if you're doing that in an electrical engineering lab, but this principle simply wouldn't apply itself in the depths of space without leaving dirty great skidmarks of evidential observations all over space. I'd love to see your reasoning why anyone would accept such an absurd idea with lensed light across the cosmos?
It is a supposition that the physical constants have not changed. For that matter, it is a supposition that logic can analyze things correctly. It certainly doesn't work to analyze God, who we are told is love, since love is not logical.

I know that. I wish the scientists would stop acting like it is.

According to this: Hydrocarbon exploration - Wikipedia oil exploring is mostly a matter of seeing what is there now, although geologists are asked. Nonetheless, it is a high risk venture, which means none of these methods are dependable. From the sound of this, most of it is a matter of seeing what is there now, not based on the theory of when it came to be. This lsit of methods of uranium exploration Uranium Exploration: A Guide for the Uninitiated sounds to me like it is 100% observation of what is there now, and does not make use of the theories of when it got there at all.

The only use I know of for atmospheric deposits in ice cores is to try to prove that the earth is old, and to predict climate based on the last few centuries.

Let's try this argument. Before God created the world, the world was formless and void. God's first act was to create light. Formlessness certainly could include a lot of singularities in space, and light would be the first thing they would affect. The ancients argue that God left creation incomplete on purpose to create motion. Combining the two says that random singularities might still be there, affecting light. Given the vastness of space, there could be enough of them to affect all distant observations made so far. And there is no reason to assume the singularities are large enough to leave traces that are visible to current technology.
 
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Astrophile

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Okay, I call Furphy on you being a professor. Surely, even a Mathematics professor would know that science is never proven fact

It depends on what you mean here. For all practical purposes, some scientific theories might as well be proven facts, as for example the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gases. It is extremely unlikely that these theories will be completely disproved, to the extent that it will turn out to be possible to construct a perpetual-motion machine.

In the same way, although our present understanding of the age of the Earth and the evolution of life will require modification, it is very unlikely that the scientific evidence will turn out to be consistent with the Earth's being less than 10,000 years old or with living species coming into existence from nothing and then remaining unchanged through thousands of generations of reproduction. What the creationists are really saying is that we cannot trust scientific evidence and scientific theories because natural processes can always be abrogated by supernatural acts of God. (The last paragraph of Ken Behrens's post 308 illustrates this to perfection.) This is quite different from saying that scientific theories will always be subject to modification as we obtain new evidence.
 
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Ken Behrens

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Would be a good topic to cover in psychology class; the psychology of belief.
Should be a prerequisite for research scientists. (Most of the math teaching I do is to adults but at the high school level. Most adults have no math skills. I often wonder if it their hatred for science that causes this. But remember, I am speaking of the USA, where all the freedom of religion started.)
 
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Ken Behrens

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Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

The ancients were just as sure the earth was only a few thousand years old.

Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

The ancients were just as sure each species was created separately.

Are you discounting our discovery that they were wrong?

Do you know why the conclusions were reached, on these subjects, that they were wrong?
I was there when science discovered fats are bad to eat. Now I am there that they have discovered they are not. Same for sugar being good for you. Same for the "truth" I was taught that the Great Pyramid does not contain the constant pi.

We do not discover, we oscillate between perceptions. Eccl. 1:9-11.
 
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PsychoSarah

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It is a supposition that the physical constants have not changed.
Not really. Since objects in space, such as stars, can be billions of light years away, it means that what we are actually looking at is what was there billions of years ago. Still follows the same physical rules as we observe today. "but Sarah, that's assuming the speed of light is constant".

It takes a lot of not understanding what light is to think that the speed of light could have been so different in the past as to allow us to observe objects billions of light years away, with only a few thousand years in which to do it. So, how different would the speed of light have to be for us to see the farthest object observed with a telescope, a galaxy 13.3 billion light years away, if the earth was, say, 10,000 years old just to make the math easier on me? Well, it'd have to be approximately 1.33 million times faster than the current speed of light. But light is a particle of energy, so you have two branching ways for this to go, and they are both bad.

1. An energy increase that defies thermodynamics is not required for light to move at this faster speed, which would affect the basic energy needs for various reactions and cause stars to fall apart as they begin to form.

2. The energy was there and taken away somehow, but now light particles contain too much energy and would cook any life.

Change the constants just a little and life as we know it literally can't exist, and if life formed prior to the changes, it'd be destroyed upon the change in physics.

For that matter, it is a supposition that logic can analyze things correctly. It certainly doesn't work to analyze God, who we are told is love, since love is not logical.

-_- basic logic and science are different processes, which is why science can end with conclusions that are entirely counter intuitive. I don't suppose that logic can analyze anything correctly. I don't have to.


Let's try this argument. Before God created the world, the world was formless and void. God's first act was to create light. Formlessness certainly could include a lot of singularities in space, and light would be the first thing they would affect.
Illogical, singularities have form, and light gets sucked into them. Heck, space itself has form.

The ancients argue that God left creation incomplete on purpose to create motion. Combining the two says that random singularities might still be there, affecting light. Given the vastness of space, there could be enough of them to affect all distant observations made so far. And there is no reason to assume the singularities are large enough to leave traces that are visible to current technology.
Do you not realize that black holes contain gravitational singularities, and that they are easily observed via the effects they have on surrounding matter? Also, you are combining multiple theologies here that contradict each other.
 
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Ken Behrens

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Sorry, your notions are without substance. For one thing, you haven't specified a consistent way to do what you propose, anyway, which means you are engaging in rank speculation without evidence. For another thing, you dishonor God the Creator by claiming He arranged things to deceive us when we start checking the evidence. For a third thing, you fail to understand how consistently the whole picture of the cosmos revealed through modern science all hangs together in a consistent way. One has to doubt one's lying eyes to go in your direction here.
I am responding to an OP that asks what can we teach if creationism is mandated instead of evolution. I am simply starting with the old order of science (from ancient Greece/Rome, etc.) and reanalyzing the observations of modern scientists in their terms.

Nothing is dishonoring God. Humans invented logic; God is love, and love is not logical. We are the ones thinking these methods will work. Logic is full of self-contradictory statements, like "this sentence is false". God defines truth, we do not.

Prov. 12:15

I am not saying the theories you espouse are wrong. I am saying they are irrelevant for any progress, rejected by many people, not understandable to a lot of third world countries, and derived with a system that contains inherent contradictions. And, they could be replaced tomorrow, if culture wills it, just like the ancient ideas were.

Consistent way: God has given us unlimited blessings. We have chosen to accept this subset over here:{.....}. The people in Bible times accepted that subset over there: {......} The science of each time described the world that the choice of blessings created. Faith can change the laws of science by choosing a different set of blessings, just like Jesus walked on water, fed 5000 people, and raised the dead, and tells us we can do also.

Or can you tell me, using our science, where the other 4993 loaves of bread came from that day?
 
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Ken Behrens

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Not really. Since objects in space, such as stars, can be billions of light years away, it means that what we are actually looking at is what was there billions of years ago. Still follows the same physical rules as we observe today. "but Sarah, that's assuming the speed of light is constant".

It takes a lot of not understanding what light is to think that the speed of light could have been so different in the past as to allow us to observe objects billions of light years away, with only a few thousand years in which to do it. So, how different would the speed of light have to be for us to see the farthest object observed with a telescope, a galaxy 13.3 billion light years away, if the earth was, say, 10,000 years old just to make the math easier on me? Well, it'd have to be approximately 1.33 million times faster than the current speed of light. But light is a particle of energy, so you have two branching ways for this to go, and they are both bad.

1. An energy increase that defies thermodynamics is not required for light to move at this faster speed, which would affect the basic energy needs for various reactions and cause stars to fall apart as they begin to form.

2. The energy was there and taken away somehow, but now light particles contain too much energy and would cook any life.

Change the constants just a little and life as we know it literally can't exist, and if life formed prior to the changes, it'd be destroyed upon the change in physics.



-_- basic logic and science are different processes, which is why science can end with conclusions that are entirely counter intuitive. I don't suppose that logic can analyze anything correctly. I don't have to.



Illogical, singularities have form, and light gets sucked into them. Heck, space itself has form.


Do you not realize that black holes contain gravitational singularities, and that they are easily observed via the effects they have on surrounding matter? Also, you are combining multiple theologies here that contradict each other.
Think of light as escape velocity to the fourth dimension. Anything faster isn't here anymore. If we started elsewhere, we would have seen it there. The speed of light could have originally been infinite, and as we pushed ourselves away form the presence of God, we also pushed ourselves away from the faster parts of it.

I do not believe the constants changed a little. I think they changed a lot into a new equilibrium state.

You will have to explain how science comes up with counterintuitive conclusions that are not logical. I have never seen anything in math which is not logical, even though much is counterintuitive.

Space has form, but are we certain what it is?

Space is so vast, that light from a distant star could fall into a singularity so small, that no other matter is around for us to observe the effects.
 
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PsychoSarah

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Think of light as escape velocity to the fourth dimension.
That would be ignoring its particle like properties.

Anything faster isn't here anymore. If we started elsewhere, we would have seen it there. The speed of light could have originally been infinite, and as we pushed ourselves away form the presence of God, we also pushed ourselves away from the faster parts of it.
Incorrect, you are treating the physical constants as if they have no influence on each other at all. You change the speed of light, even a little, and you change the whole makeup of the universe. Also, if all those light particles that experienced the faster speed of light were gone, and the Earth was young, we still wouldn't see a galaxy 13.3 billion light years away, because the existing light particles would be moving too slowly by a factor of over a billion.

I do not believe the constants changed a little. I think they changed a lot into a new equilibrium state.
The universe isn't in equilibrium, which is part of the reason life can exist. Also, this does not help your case, the more the constants change, the less likely it represents our universe at any time.

You will have to explain how science comes up with counterintuitive conclusions that are not logical. I have never seen anything in math which is not logical, even though much is counterintuitive.
Counter intuitive: apes that walked upright existed before apes with enlarged brains. Evidence: fossil record. Intuitive conclusion made prior to the fossil discoveries: apes with enlarged brains came first, then developed bipedal movement over time. Intuition is largely condemned in science due to the fact it often leads people to make incorrect conclusions.

Space has form, but are we certain what it is?
Not entirely, but not knowing something doesn't mean we won't know in the future.

Space is so vast, that light from a distant star could fall into a singularity so small, that no other matter is around for us to observe the effects.
-_- black holes tend to already be around vast amounts of matter, given that they are gravitational singularities that only form with sufficient matter present, and that they draw matter to them. Singularities themselves are small, but they need large amounts of matter to form, in the case of black holes. There certainly could be black holes that have drawn in all outside matter near them that we can't see, but their number isn't relevant to our discussion. I never took issue with your proposal of there being tons of singularities "in the beginning", I took issue with your suggestion that they don't have form.
 
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Ken Behrens

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That would be ignoring its particle like properties.


Incorrect, you are treating the physical constants as if they have no influence on each other at all. You change the speed of light, even a little, and you change the whole makeup of the universe. Also, if all those light particles that experienced the faster speed of light were gone, and the Earth was young, we still wouldn't see a galaxy 13.3 billion light years away, because the existing light particles would be moving too slowly by a factor of over a billion.


The universe isn't in equilibrium, which is part of the reason life can exist. Also, this does not help your case, the more the constants change, the less likely it represents our universe at any time.


Counter intuitive: apes that walked upright existed before apes with enlarged brains. Evidence: fossil record. Intuitive conclusion made prior to the fossil discoveries: apes with enlarged brains came first, then developed bipedal movement over time. Intuition is largely condemned in science due to the fact it often leads people to make incorrect conclusions.


Not entirely, but not knowing something doesn't mean we won't know in the future.


-_- black holes tend to already be around vast amounts of matter, given that they are gravitational singularities that only form with sufficient matter present, and that they draw matter to them. Singularities themselves are small, but they need large amounts of matter to form, in the case of black holes. There certainly could be black holes that have drawn in all outside matter near them that we can't see, but their number isn't relevant to our discussion. I never took issue with your proposal of there being tons of singularities "in the beginning", I took issue with your suggestion that they don't have form.
Particles only appeared in a third dimension, not in the fourth. They are part of the intersection of light with 3-space.

Settling into three dimensional space was part of the earth settling into creation.

Equilibrium may well be the wrong word. I mean there are certain combinations of constants that give you a stable universe (at least for a while). The universe shifted between those states. Until we can get a better handle on those states, we do not know what the net effect will be of changing one (and thus several) constants.

But it is logic that causes us to prefer the fossil record to intuition. Just as in mathematics.

I'm not sure we know what we think we know now.

I meant singularities are implied by the Hebrew words tohu and bohu, meaning formlessness and void. Singularities do not have reimanian metric form.
 
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PsychoSarah

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Particles only appeared in a third dimension, not in the fourth. They are part of the intersection of light with 3-space.
Working with the 4th dimension doesn't help you, since if you want to say that light escapes the 3rd dimension completely (btw, does a sphere lose it's second dimension in obtaining a third?), that wreaks processes in the universe necessary for life even worse if they have none of the properties of the 3rd dimension retained.

Settling into three dimensional space was part of the earth settling into creation.
You assert without evidence, or even a bible verse.

Equilibrium may well be the wrong word. I mean there are certain combinations of constants that give you a stable universe (at least for a while).
The range is exceedingly narrow, and we live in a dynamic universe.

The universe shifted between those states. Until we can get a better handle on those states, we do not know what the net effect will be of changing one (and thus several) constants.
Mathematical models do well for that, which is why I know life as we know it requires pretty specific physics. Usually, just changing gravity a little wreaks stuff in a major way. And you want these constants to change a lot more than by a small fraction. Not only that, but you want them to fluctuate, which has never been observed.

But it is logic that causes us to prefer the fossil record to intuition. Just as in mathematics.
People are often wrong, removing the human element as much as possible of course is the logical solution, but that just makes relying on science logical, not the process itself logic based.

I meant singularities are implied by the Hebrew words tohu and bohu, meaning formlessness and void. Singularities do not have reimanian metric form.
You are assuming that those words imply singularities, something you would never get from anything described as formless and void. That sounds more like "outside" the universe to me, if I were to modernize it. Since the universe started as one singularity that expanded out, expanding "form" in the place of "void".
 
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quatona

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Let's say that the courts rule that Christian creationism is a valid subject to teach in science classes in public schools, in addition to (or in place of) the ToE. (With the current administration, such a possibility isn't so far-fetched anymore).
Personally, I´m wondering how they could spend more than two minutes teaching science, without actually turning it into a religion (or at best: philosophy) class.
Not even the most zealous proponents of ID here present actual science when arguing for it.
So I guess, I´d be curious to see a transcript of just the very first lesson of Creationism/ID as taught in science class (assuming that it´s getting ever worse from there).
 
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Bugeyedcreepy

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It is a supposition that the physical constants have not changed. For that matter, it is a supposition that logic can analyze things correctly. It certainly doesn't work to analyze God, who we are told is love, since love is not logical.
It isn't any more supposition that the physical constants have changed than it is that our sun is doing exactly the same thing here and now as they were doing there and then billions of light years ago that far away from us.

Logic doesn't analyse anything btw. For the purposes of scientific investigation, whatever you've been told about anything, God or otherwise, can be safely set to one side if it can't be verified with your own observations and experiments (fyi, reading what some unknown author wrote thousands of years ago is not an observation or experiment).
I know that. I wish the scientists would stop acting like it is.
Well, as much as they don't say it, it might as well be proven fact. also, I agree with Astrophile here, and he explains this perfectly...
It depends on what you mean here. For all practical purposes, some scientific theories might as well be proven facts, as for example the first and second laws of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory of gases. It is extremely unlikely that these theories will be completely disproved, to the extent that it will turn out to be possible to construct a perpetual-motion machine.

In the same way, although our present understanding of the age of the Earth and the evolution of life will require modification, it is very unlikely that the scientific evidence will turn out to be consistent with the Earth's being less than 10,000 years old or with living species coming into existence from nothing and then remaining unchanged through thousands of generations of reproduction. What the creationists are really saying is that we cannot trust scientific evidence and scientific theories because natural processes can always be abrogated by supernatural acts of God. (The last paragraph of Ken Behrens's post 308 illustrates this to perfection.) This is quite different from saying that scientific theories will always be subject to modification as we obtain new evidence.
Newton's Theory of Gravity is another theory that wasn't entirely accurate. As Gould said, "Einstein's Theory of Gravity replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome, and man descended from ape-like creatures whether we did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism, or some other way yet to be discovered." - Even if the current scientific views on the age of Earth, Universe, Atomic Theory, Germ Theory, Einstein's Theory of Relativity or the Theory of Evolution aren't entirely accurate, the corrections will be minor and the broad underlying principles they eschew wouldn't be fundamentally altered, let alone discarded for an entirely nonsensical view of a 6,000 to 10,000 year old earth and universe, with 'kinds' created in their original forms, etc.
According to this: Hydrocarbon exploration - Wikipedia oil exploring is mostly a matter of seeing what is there now, although geologists are asked. Nonetheless, it is a high risk venture, which means none of these methods are dependable. From the sound of this, most of it is a matter of seeing what is there now, not based on the theory of when it came to be. This lsit of methods of uranium exploration Uranium Exploration: A Guide for the Uninitiated sounds to me like it is 100% observation of what is there now, and does not make use of the theories of when it got there at all.
Okay. A few things here, Much of the world's uranium reserves are in paleozoic unconformity type deposits, that is to say, in layers of earth between 2.6Gya and 0.5Gya. Most of these uranium deposits are further narrowed down to either 2.6Gya or between 1.6Gya and 1.2Gya timeframes. Prospecting for pretty much anything in the ground is now observant of a community database that records the layers of exposed rock, their age and where they are all over the world. Oil deposits in particular are dependent on buried biomass accumulation over millions of years, an accurate knowledge of the age and location of a prehistoric swampland, marshland or oceanic microbial flourish is a huge advantage in today's highly competitive oil and liquid petroleum industry. If you think mining and oil companies just wander out of their cities and just start looking around randomly, then you're about 150 years out of date. Through this science, these companies have been able to supply our civilizations ever insatiable thirst for fossil fuels and mineral resources with ever increasing efficiency in refining and accuracy in identifying the next crude oil or resource deposit.

A side note - it takes about 20 metric tonnes of plant matter to get a kilo of crude oil. (There's about 3.2kg in a gallon btw...) -this would be almost 2500 tonnes of plant life per barrel of crude oil. At the end of 2015, we were consuming around 97million barrels of crude a day. The amount of plant and animal matter required in a 6,000-10,000 year old earth to get just a year full of oil we use (that's just over 35 billion barrels) is absurdity of the highest order, that's not even considering the amount of time required to get these deposits...
The only use I know of for atmospheric deposits in ice cores is to try to prove that the earth is old, and to predict climate based on the last few centuries.
So you're ignorant on the value of studying ice cores? Colour me surprised. The scientific community hasn't any requirement to "prove that the earth is old", so that nonsense can be set to one side. We can map out the climate from these ice cores for the last 680,000 years and we've found ice cores that go back to 1.5Mya. The most accurate and researched ice core is of course the Vostok ice cores, these date back to 150,000 years and have been dated using at least 5 independent methods, all correlating to the same result. From this, we've been able to map out, as you say, global climate over that time. If you dispute that these ice cores are accurate, I'd be interested to know why past the standard YEC's "Scientists might be wrong" dismissal.
Let's try this argument. Before God created the world, the world was formless and void. God's first act was to create light. Formlessness certainly could include a lot of singularities in space, and light would be the first thing they would affect. The ancients argue that God left creation incomplete on purpose to create motion. Combining the two says that random singularities might still be there, affecting light. Given the vastness of space, there could be enough of them to affect all distant observations made so far. And there is no reason to assume the singularities are large enough to leave traces that are visible to current technology.
According to Genesis 1:1, God's first act was to create the heaven and the earth, light came after that. Apart from that, everything else you've said here seems creative & ad-hoc. As I mentioned earlier, singularities would leave tell-tale signs - in the same way we know where black holes are even though we can't see them. A singularity that warps light & distance to the extent you are trying to suppose would be about as obvious as an intergalactic boot to the head.
 
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No, but we have no reasonable basis to suppose they are not, either. That is the point I am making.
We don't? We know that fundamental changes in the physical forces would leave evidence behind. We don't see that evidence. Therefore we have a reasonable basis to suppose that the fundamental physical forces haven't changed.

In the article I saw on this, there were some other measurements of the speed of light back in the early days that need to be considered. Then, a linear correlation needs to be done of all these against time. I was unable to find the article again last night, and it has been years since I saw it.
That still doesn't determine whether the speed of light is actually slowing down or our measurements are getting more precise.

According to this article, scientists may have some evidence that the speed of light has decreased by "0.00072 +/- 0.00018 % over the past 6-10 billion years".

Not really enought to fit 14 billions years of the universe's existence into 6,000 years.

If such changes occurred, they occurred before written history.
How convenient.

Well, more or less: The sun is supposed to have stood still for Joshua, and retrograded for Hezekiah - that should have shifted gravity a little bit. Josephus also claims the flood happened after human history - and that would certainly have messed up the earth's spin and thus gravity.
If the Flood occurred after human history, why do we have so many records from civilizations whose history starts before the Flood and continues right through it with no mention of a worldwide flood?

This is true. I am not claiming that a black hole is involved, only that scientists are aware that the fundamental physical constants can change under at least this one circumstance. My point is that there may be other such circumstances that we do not yet know about.
So we shouldn't trust any observation we make on the basis that there might be something we don't know about that is affecting that observation?

I am not opposed to the current scientific theories. I am only opposed to the proclamation that they are proven facts.
Theories and facts are two different things. The fact of evolution is that populations of organisms change over time. The Theory of Evolution is the best supported theory for why the fact of evolution happens.
 
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Logic was invented in about 500BC. I have had students in my classes who never heard of logical communication until they learned it in French or English at missionary school. And I have had trouble with difficult logical passages being untranslatable from English to Spanish, due to the different paths the languages developed. So logic is something new. It also contains intrinsic paradoxes, and it is not fully established in human thought even now. I am not certain that it is wise to use logic to prove something far older, and that we allege is fundamental to the physical laws that produced us, our minds, and then logic.
:doh:Let me rephrase it then.

Shouldn't we have a reasonable basis to suppose both are wrong? Otherwise it is just a "what if" scenario.
 
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