Evidence against a recent creation - RationalWiki

There is perhaps no greater attack upon science and rational thought than the doctrine of a recent creation. Young earth creationists deny much of astronomy, geology, biology, palaeontology, chemistry, geomorphology and physics in favor of pseudoscience and their biblically based view that the world is only 6,000 years old.

This article presents some of the reasons why we know that the world is not "young". The entries below are listed in alphabetical order, while in the contents box at the right they can be found listed by the approximate minimum they put on the age of the earth. It is also important to note that these dating methods are not mutually exclusive and where their range, accuracy and applicability overlap, the dates they produce are concordant with each other.

Some young earth creationists accept that this evidence is convincing, but simply argue that God created the universe 6,000 years ago, but set it up so that it would look exactly like a 4.54 billion year old Earth, with fossils, DNA evidence, and eroded rocks created in the state that we would expect them to be in if they were much older - Phillip Gosse, the 19th century English naturalist, was a strong proponent of this view. This view is unpopular even with much of the YEC community,^[1] since it raises the question of why God would create fake fossils and a fake history - do they exist to test our faith, separate the weak from the strong, or does God simply find them funny? These rationalisations tend to be unsatisfying to believers and skeptics alike. We cannot falsify this claim, since there would be no difference between a universe created 6,000 years ago that was indistinguishable from a much older one, and the much older universe of science; however, like other similarly unfalsifiable arguments, it is of little value. 
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