Since this field gets little traction here, I anticipate very little interest in this challenge.
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Two billion Christians are committed to a record (1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) indicating we are now in the 6,018th year of the cosmos (James Ussher: 6,029th).
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Two billion other theists (mostly Muslims and Jews) are committed to the same record. Jews make this 5786 AM, recognizing that the Seder Olam Rabbah deliberately skipped about a dozen Persian kings, which I reckon as gaps totalling 232 years. Muslims, generally agreeing, also invented the kalam cosmology that teaches a finite beginning in historic times.
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For the rest of mankind, all written history testifies the universe and earth are thousands of years old; even the Sumerian King List doesn't exaggerate beyond human lifespans of 43,200 years (Enmenluana), and the legendary Buddhists stop with lifespans of 100,000 years, still within the range of thousands and not billions. 200 creation traditions demonstrate the origin of the universe as designed and humanity as a rapid development, as a universal testimony.
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All written science for 5,000 years [with the exception of a trend begun by Huxley, Darwin, and Wallace about 200 years ago] assumed a similar timeframe of thousands of years and an orderly creation by an external power.
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Therefore the only exception to this testimony is a demonstrable cabal of antitheists that have invented and declared a "war" on theism and commandeered control of a scientific establishment that censors all other opinions and is sustained by leeched tax money (Stein, Expelled). These follow a pattern of other previous occasional pockets of people (not "scientists" like this time but always religionists) who claim vast age for the universe but who never could catch on due to their inconsistency and infighting (e.g. gnosticism).
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This cabal relies on an ever-spinning series of cave shadows that are abandoned when they become useless, but during their lifetimes are upheld as "settled science" (finch beaks, Lamarckianism, Peking Man, steady state, hopeful monsters, panspermia, and nowadays dark matter, dark energy, anthropic principle, math universe hypothesis). They rely on parroting of pictographic narratives rather than on deliberative knowledge, such as the new "tree of life", Haeckel's embryos, Miller's tubes, the "march of progress" apes and men, etc. (Wells, Icons of Evolution).
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One demonstration of the bankruptcy of this position is NASA's admission that neither of two theories, one dating the universe at 9 billion years rounded, and one dating it at 11-18 billion years, can be taken as settled science. If an official repository of old-earth evidence admits that all old-earth theories are suspect because they disagree and the error has not yet been discerned, then there is no proof of old earth.
“Yeah it’s like catastrophism, but only once…. I call it catastrophe-ism”
They both are catastrophism, yours is cyclical, mine is unique.
Isn’t that just a fancy name for “God did it”, and actually doesn’t have any explanatory power?
"God having a comet do it" is as much explanatory power as the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis. Plus I have lots of data on the shelf about how he did it hydrogeologically, but I'm trying to avoid Gish gallops. Better for me to remind you that the Sphinx has water damage, which fits neatly with it being originally prediluvian.
Except “every 26,000 years (full cycle), 13,000 years (half cycle), or 6,500 years (quarter cycle) the potential for a catastrophe rises precipitously” is the claim, not what you said, and that claim has a whole helluva lot more predictive power than “God did it”, which is precisely why I frequently link to the video which presents that info so succinctly.
Erm, yeah, I know the Sphinx dates to atleast 8,000 (lowest bound by the geologist who did the work) years ago and likely 13,000+ (aka actually antediluvian, if we’re talking about a global flood, and not seemingly more localized Bronze Age collapse of the Mediterranean)… more appropriate for my other thread no?