Scientific disciplines that young earth creationism contradicts (from Wiki, which has citations):

Physics and chemistry (including absolute dating methods), geology, astronomy, cosmology, paleontology, molecular biology, genomics, linguistics, anthropology, archaeology, climatology and dendrochronology among others.

Damn, this scientific conspiracy goes deep!

This indeed is a big problem. Check out the video created by the John C. Wells Planetarium and the Dept. of Physics & Astronomy at James Madison University: [url redacted]

Nice far more simplified explanation than http://videosift.com/video/Why-is-the-Sky-Dark-at-Night gives. I think this one is better for friends/family who aren't into science as much, as the other video seems it is aimed more for people who understand more and have a stronger interest in astronomy. I think I'll have to share this one...

@ChaosEngine

Oh sweet irony, I'm being called wilfully ignorant by a young-earther.

I'm not going to refute you. I don't need to; @BicycleRepairMan has already done an excellent job of it.

An excellent refutation? He cherry picked one sentence out of my reply, a reply where I had demonstrated the fallacy of his argument from incredulity by proving his assumption of the constancy of radioactive decay rates was nothing more than the conventional wisdom of our times. Is this what passes for logical argumentation in your mind? He posited a fallacious argument. I exposed the fallacy. He ignored the refutation and cherry picked his reply. You seem to be showing that in your eagerness to agree with everything which is contrary to my position that you have a weak filter on information which supports your preconceived ideas. Why is it that a skeptic is always pathologically skeptical of everything except his own positions, I wonder?

@BicycleRepairMan

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Not only was your prior argument fallacious, but I refuted it. Now you're ignoring that and cherry picking your replies here. Seems pretty intellectually dishonest to me? In any case, I'll reply to what you've said here. I was going to get into the technical issues concerning why scientists believe the Universe is so old, and the history of the theory, but so far you have given me no reason to believe that any of it will be carefully considered.

Instead I'll answer with a portion of an article I found, which was printed in "The Ledger" on Feb 17th 2000. It's interview of a molecular biologist who wanted to remain anonymous

Caylor: "Do you believe that the information evolved?"

MB: "George, nobody I know in my profession believes it evolved. It was engineered by genius beyond genius, and such information could not have been written any other way. The paper and ink did not write the book! Knowing what we know, it is ridiculous to think otherwise."

Caylor: "Have you ever stated that in a public lecture, or in any public writings?"

MB: "No, I just say it evolved. To be a molecular biologist requires one to hold onto two insanities at all times:
One, it would be insane to believe in evolution when you can see the truth for yourself.
Two, it would be insane to say you don't believe evolution. All government work, research grants, papers, big college lectures -- everything would stop. I'd be out of a job, or relegated to the outer fringes where I couldn't earn a decent living.”

Caylor: “I hate to say it, but that sounds intellectually dishonest.”

MB: “The work I do in genetic research is honorable. We will find the cures to many of mankind's worst diseases. But in the meantime, we have to live with the elephant in the living room.”

Caylor: “What elephant?”

MB: “Creation design. It's like an elephant in the living room. It moves around, takes up space, loudly trumpets, bumps into us, knocks things over, eats a ton of hay, and smells like an elephant. And yet we have to swear it isn't there!”

Here are some selected quotes:

We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin

"In China its O.K. to criticize Darwin but not the government, while in the United States its O.K. to criticize the government, but not Darwin."

Dr. J.Y. Chen,

Chinese Paleontologist

Even if all the data point to an intelligent designer, such an hypothesis is excluded from science because it is not naturalistic."

S. C. Todd,
Correspondence to Nature 410(6752):423, 30 Sept. 1999

"Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it."

Steven Pinker,
Professor of Psychology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA., "How the Mind Works," [1997]

"Biologists are simply naive when they talk about experiments designed to test the theory of evolution. It is not testable. They may happen to stumble across facts which would seem to conflict with its predictions. These facts will invariably be ignored and their discoverers will undoubtedly be deprived of continuing research grants."

Professor Whitten,
Professor of Genetics, University of Melbourne, Australia, 1980 Assembly Week address.

"Science is not so much concerned with truth as it is with consensus. What counts as truth is what scientists can agree to count as truth at any particular moment in time. [Scientists] are not really receptive or not really open-minded to any sorts of criticisms or any sorts of claims that actually are attacking some of the established parts of the research (traditional) paradigm, in this case neo-Darwinism. So it is very difficult for people who are pushing claims that contradict that paradigm to get a hearing. They find it hard to [get] research grants; they find it hard to get their research published; they find it very hard."

Prof. Evelleen Richards,
Historian of Science at the University of NSW, Australia

Speaks for itself, I think..

@shinyblurry said
It's quite a racket they have going, where the evidence is interpreted by the conclusion. Last time I checked that wasn't science.

...and to see an exampe of such a racket, check the flood "geology" link.

Seriously, you cant see the blinding irony in your own words? So, things like radiometric dating, fossils, geology, astronomy, chemistry, biology are all just parts of a self-perpetuating racket confirming each others conclusions in a big old circlejerking conspiracy of astronomical proportions.. well, lets assume then that it is. So they are basically chasing the foregone conclusion that the universe is over 13 billion years old and that life on this planet emerged some 3,6 billion years ago and has evolved ever since. But where did these wild conclusions come from? Who established the dogma that scientists seems to mindlessly work to confirm, and why? And why 13,72 billion years then? Why not 100 billion years, or 345 million years?

The thing is, what you have here is an alleged "crime" with no incentives, no motivation.. Why on earth would all the worlds scientists, depentently and independently and over many generations converge to promote a falsehood of no significance to anyone? it might make some kind of sense if someones doctrine was threatened unless the world was exactly 13.72 billion years old. Or if someone believed they were going to hell unless they believed trilobites died out 250 million years ago.. The thing is, nobody believes that.

The truth is pretty much staring you in the face right here. The conclusions of science on things like the age of the earth emerged gradually; Darwin, and even earlier naturalists had no idea of the exact age of the earth, or even a good approximation, but they did figure this much: It must be very, very old. So old that it challenged their prior beliefs and assumptions about a god-created world as described in their holy book. And thats were nearly all scientists come from: They grew up and lived in societies that looked to holy books , scripture and religion for the answers, and everybody assumed they had proper answers until the science was done.If scientists were corrupt conspirators working to preserve dogma, they be like Kent Hovind or Ken Ham. Ignoring vast mountains of facts and evidence, and focus on a few distorted out-of-context quotations to confirm what they already "know".

Social sciences are real sciences; the problem is they're startlingly unsophisticated compared to their cousins.

All knowledge doesn't progress at the same rate. At the moment we're stuck with comparatively a mediaeval or pre-mediaeval understanding in some fields. As astrology is to astronomy, as alchemy is to chemistry, so the modern social sciences are to their future successors.

Give it a few thousand years...

Just a few decades ago, most scientists thought the idea of asteroids crashing to Earth to be ludicrous. Today, this same idea isan accepted fact. Not only do asteroids fall to Earth, but more are being discovered every day. Yesterday, one of these newly-discovered asteroids just buzzed Earth. Coincidentally, this comes just days after NASA said that thenear-Earth asteroid population was larger than previously thought.

Monday, asteroid 2012KP24, which is about 69 feet across, came within about 32,000 miles ofEarth, well within the Moon’s orbit. Yesterday, asteroid 2012KT42 came within a mere 9,000 miles of Earth. In a fact thatmay be especially disconcerting tosome, the time span between discovery and close approach for the second asteroid was only a day! Talk about next to no warning.

Now for the good news: the asteroids were small and even if either were to collide with the Earth, they may not even have been large enough to survive the descent through the atmosphere,burning up in a spectacular fireball instead. Still, though, the fact that an asteroid can sneak up on us out of space with only afew days notice is the troubling part of this whole situation.

It is a perfectly logical idea that an asteroid could, one day, destroy life as we know it on Earth. The good news is that scientists are busy developing plans to avert doomsday. The problem is this: in these doomsday prevention plans, the time frame for a response is typically, at the least, months, notdays. With only a couple of days notice and with current technology, it would probably be impossible to do anything to save the planet and our civilization.

Read more: http://scienceray.com/astronomy/pair-of-asteroids-justbuzzed-earth/#ixzz1yT02pGAK (watch for pop-up ads)

Many exciting things happen and can be witnessed in astronomy, this is not one of them.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

>> ^charliem:
....why didnt the big bang need a cause?

The theoretical physicist who most recently takes this question head on is Lawrence Krauss, you can see him do a lecture on this topic here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
He has also written a book about this subject since the video drew a lot of attention: http://ww
w.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337434114&sr=1-1


Quantum mechanics is still a cause, even if the universe itself was born from a quantum strangeness, its still SOMETHING. This is vastly different from no cause at all.

Krauss' talk is to lamen understanding of nothing....ie apparently empty space with still yet something there (the laws of nature have particles and anti particles popping in and out trillions of times a second!!!) This is still not nothing.

Still havnt explained it well enough to qualify that as saying - there was no need for a cause. QED is still a cause.

>> ^Bhruic:

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

No.
That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.

We have no idea how many planets there are in the galaxy. We haven't discovered enough of them to determine any sort of pattern. So claiming that we "know" there are 1.6 planets per star is indeed speculation. Similarily, suggesting that "The Big Bang did not need a cause" is speculation. We don't have nearly enough information about how it happened, or under what conditions it happened to be able to do anything more than theorize at this point.
There are other examples, but I'm too lazy to go through them all. Claiming certainty about things for which we have insufficient evidence to make such claims is poor science.


He doesnt say "we know there are 1.6 planets" he specifically says "an ESTIMATED 1.6 planets" so its an estimate based on the available evidence, which is that we've discovered 770 and counting planets, and we know that its currently very hard to detect planets, yet we find lots. From this we can extrapolate, and the 1.6 ratio is probably at the low end of an estimate.

I wont pretend to understand how the big bang didnt need a cause, but the lawrence Krauss talk I linked to explains this in some detail. Notice that he does NOT say "the big bang didnt HAVE a cause", he says it didnt NEED one. In other words, physicists have worked out ways the big bang could have happened without a cause. That doesnt nescessarily mean that it didnt actually have a cause. Its like saying "Cats dont need owners" It doesnt mean that noone owns a cat.

Fact 1: An estimated (the number may be higher) 1.6 planets per star in our galaxy
http://www.space.com/14200-160-billion-alien-planets-milky-galaxy.html

Fact 2: 100 billion galaxies:
We know there are that many, because we've seen them. The hubble space telescope was pointed at a tiny , random black spot in the sky (where no stars from our own galaxy was blocking the field of view) and found 10000 galaxies in that tiny spot about 1/12millionth of the sky. Extrapolating that out, we get that there are atleast 100 billion galaxies, and each of them contains hundreds of millions of stars.

Fact 3:The moon has its own gravity.
Well duh...

Fact 4: 8 Planets in our solar system.
This is of course very well documented. You can see several of them on any given night. One of them , Venus will infact pass directly in front of the sun in a few days, on the 6th of June! That also happened in 2004, but the next one wont be for another 105 years! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus

Fact 5: There were galaxies in the early universe. These have been seen by the Hubble telescope and other observatories:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution

Fact 6:The earths tilted axis causes seasons: http://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/v/how-earth-s-tilt-causes-seasons

More later..

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:


No.
That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.


We have no idea how many planets there are in the galaxy. We haven't discovered enough of them to determine any sort of pattern. So claiming that we "know" there are 1.6 planets per star is indeed speculation. Similarily, suggesting that "The Big Bang did not need a cause" is speculation. We don't have nearly enough information about how it happened, or under what conditions it happened to be able to do anything more than theorize at this point.

There are other examples, but I'm too lazy to go through them all. Claiming certainty about things for which we have insufficient evidence to make such claims is poor science.

>> ^Bhruic:

Well that was a great deal of speculation, rather than facts.


No.

That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.

>> ^charliem:

....why didnt the big bang need a cause?

The theoretical physicist who most recently takes this question head on is Lawrence Krauss, you can see him do a lecture on this topic here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
He has also written a book about this subject since the video drew a lot of attention: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337434114&sr=1-1

Tags for this video have been changed from 'gravity, sun, moon, earth, astronomy' to 'gravity, sun, moon, earth, astronomy, minute physics' - edited by xxovercastxx