What scientific evidence do young earth creation scientists use to support their argument that the world and universe is young?

Answer 1

The following are some of the scientific arguments used by young earth creationists. Sometimes the arguments do not explicitly point to the Biblical age used by creationists of 6000-10,000.

1. Rapid Disintegration of Comets: means they cannot be 5 billion years old or they wouldn't exist. Around 100,000 years is postulated as a maximum.

2. Insufficient sea-floor sediment: At current rates of erosion the amount of sea-floor sediments actually found could accumulate in 12 million years. The oceans are alleged to have existed for 3 billion years.

3. Insufficent Sodium Chloride in the sea: Evolutionary estimates for the age of the earth's oceans are 3 billion years. With current rates of deposition, the salt in the sea could have accumulated in 42-62 million years at todays rate and of course much faster in the Noahic flood.

4. Decay of the magnetic field of the Earth: This is occurring too rapidly to fit the long-age evolutionary paradigm - the total energy stored having decreased by a factor of 2.7 over the past 1000 years. Creationists have a model explaining this based on sound physics.

5. Tightly bent strata: These stata, thousands of feet thick are tightly bent without cracking. Yet they are meant to have solidified over millions of years and then bent. The creationist explanation is that they formed while still plastic as the entire formation had to be soft when formed to avoid cracking. This would point to the folding having occurred thousands of years and not millions after formation.

6. Fossil Radioactivity: Radiohaloes which have shown evidence of having been squashed indicate that the Jurassic, Triassic and Eocene formations in the Colorado plateau were formed in a short time-frame - over months, not hundreds of millions of years. This is so since the rings formed by the haloes, which only exist for a short time before they decay were squashed, indicating rapid formation. If the rocks had formed over a long time span the haloes would not have been there.

7. Misplaced Helium: Helium is generated by radioactive elements as they decay. The escape of this Helium into the atmosphere can be measured. If this has been occurring for 5 billion years there should be much more Helium in the atmosphere, instead of the 0.05% that is actually there when compared to the relevant time scale.

8. Insufficient stone-age skeletons: The 100,000 year stone-age of evolutionary anthropologists should have produced many more skeletons - around 4 billion, many more of which should still be around compared to the few thousand found.

9. Recent Agriculture: The archeological evidence shows the stone age people to be as intelligent as modern man and yet it is claimed they existed for 100,000 years before discovering that plants grow from seeds. Creationists would think that it is more likely that man was without agriculture for a much shorter period immediately after the flood.

10.History too short: Stone-age people built huge monuments, did beautiful cave paintings and kept records of lunar phases. It seems unreasonable that they should wait nearly 100,000 years before beginning to make written historical records around 4-5000 BC. A much shorter Biblical time-scale seems to better fit this evidence.

Source: These points are condensed from an article by creationist Dr. Russel Humphreys, in Creation Ex Nihilo 13(3):28-31, June -August 1991.

The footnotes to this article contain the relevant scientific data relating to the points made. This will be posted as a link for those wishing to check the data or inquire further.

AnswerNo honest scientist has found substantial evidence to support creationism. Data provided is mostly from the research of creation scientists who have a religious commitment to casting doubt on the age of the earth and universe.

There is scant scientific evidence to supports the position of creationism, most of which is either misinterpreted or contradicted by more consistent data. Creationist claims and evidence tend to be misunderstood or misinterpreted facts, which when coupled with misapplied laws of science create a distorted worldview.

For example, above is a large list of "proofs", none of which make sense when properly explained and considered in the context of other scientific fields. In addition to these are others which are as easily rebuffed, leaving little to support creationism of any form, much less to cast significant doubt on evolution. For a rebuttal of each of the points above please refer to the discussion page.