Bad Old Earth Creationist Arguments
I keep hearing these arguments, from both scientists and laypeople. They are not good arguments.

If he did build it all in a week in 4006BC, I don't understand why he would create so much evidence that makes it look a lot older.

People who have been taught the world looks 'old' need to remember that for most people throughout time, the world looked 'young'. The age of the earth is an inference, based upon assumptions in both cases. It doesn't look 'old' or 'young', we merely are trained to view it that way.

YEC material have a lot of errors and are deliberately misleading and dishonest.

I here this a lot, but have yet to be told one reasonable example. Some have made reference to "Telling Lies for God" by Ian Plimer, but Ian Plimer is not exactly a reputable source, and independent investigations of his accusations of dishonesty found them all to be without substance. Heck, even talk origins, a very popular anti-creationists website, disparages the book as poor reasoning. That Christians would make these claims without evidence is troubling.

If the 'young earth creationists' are right, all the world's biological and earth scientists are either fundamentally mistaken, or engaged in a dishonest conspiracy.

This is mostly true, but not an issue. 'All' the scientists would not wrong because there are some young earth creation scientists who would be right. The history of science is completely (and I mean completely) filled with cases where 'all' the scientists were fundamentally wrong (For instance Phlogiston, Geosynclinal geology). As Thomas Kuhn detailed, science progresses through a series of revolutions where the old scientific paradigm is replaced by a revolutionary new one.

This complaint is actually an unfounded self-important claim, as if somehow, in today's scientific age, we know we have finally found the truth. Scientists have ALL been wrong before and will be again. As a physics lecturer once said at the start of semester "80% of what we are about to teach you is wrong. we don't know which 80%".

I know lots of scientists who have integrity and a passion for truth.

As did all the other scientists in the past who were wrong as well. Integrity and passion for truth do not been they are right. It is possible to be sincerely wrong.

Scientists are all trying to disprove evolution as this would make them the most famous scientist in the world.

This is not how science works. Scientific Paradigms (cf Thomas Kuhn) such as particles to people evolution or old ages are not questioned or challenged, but are used as a framework within which scientists investigate problems. Thus, when scientists find soft tissue in a supposedly 68 Million year old fossil, they don't doubt the millions of years age, but instead refer to an 'unknown process' which has preserved the soft tissue even when everything they know about soft tissue goes against it.

Or when scientists get experimental support that essentially falsifies evolution (by showing beneficial mutations conspire against each other to reduce fitness and so taken together are not beneficial) or other lab work showing beneficial mutations trigger a process of mutational meltdown and extinction, these are ignored and other 'solutions' are searched for. Thomas Kuhn's explanation for scientific paradigms makes sense of this, however Old Earth Creationist complaints about scientists trying to disprove evolution do not.

The final example is how so many of the scientific things we do depends on particles to people evolution. One example would be 'why we experiment on mice'. Yet this is another bad (and circular) argument. The similarities between creatures is used as evidence for evolution. This same similarity is what makes experimenting on mice useful, not that we evolved.

These common examples are actual just examples of rhetoric, not meaningful discussion.
- posted by Alan Grey @ Sunday, June 03, 2007