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.
Thanks Brain! You provide good questions, and yet the issue I asked about is whether the range is thousands or billions. So I'm not focusing on the Sumerians being wrong because even if they're right they're still evidence on the thousands side. The issue is that all humanity had a vast consensus on the thousands side until some cabal members instituted a cleaver takeover with Darwin as frontman until they coopted a scientific establishment on the subject so that censorship could be enforced.
I recognize that a couple Hindu passages can be read as finding ancient dates, but this becomes cherry-picking from what are obviously mathematical conceptual epochs that have no reference to history. So that minority testimony shouldn't affect the overall argument: if the cherry-picking happens to be right that can't be determined by its context but only by other evidence.
So your first link does exactly that, picks a date and then supports it from science. But it rapidly descends into just the kind of rarefied numerology that others do. Real numerology is accurate and supportive, fake is often inaccurate and usually an appeal to authority. In this case your source admits our universe's "total life span is 311.04 trillion human years" (after pulling an epoch of 13 billion out of that as if it's significant because a close match). Immediately after this "hit", the article gives a "miss" by claiming "the perimeter of the (Vedic) universe ... =~ 14 trillion miles" and then bypassing the fact that this is not the universe's estimated perimeter of sextillions to septillions of miles. It deflects by comparing roughly to the light-day, except that would be a radius and not a perimeter (and I'm not checking the original language on that). It says "navagarha" (which can mean "nine planets"), referring in its context to sun, moon, classical five, north, and south, actually refers to the nine planets recognized in a very narrow era (1930-2006) even though now we have 8 planets and several dwarf planets. So the two links contain a few interesting hits but that doesn't tell us how much has been missed. Detailed review would likely show further cherry-picking. But at least I can say, for conspiracy purposes, that the cabal is obviously inspired by Hinduism, as they acknowledge at CERN!
Yes, adaptation of knowledge is good, and that's the spirit of OP. VSL shows that science still hasn't adapted to the contradictions inherent in old-earth theory, and so I am contributing to that dialogue. You dissuade me from an old book series but also refer me to another old book series as your primary argument. My approach, after questioning all the book series in my youth, was to fit knowledge together that I was certain of until I could be confident I had a sufficiently consistent whole. In that whole, VSL (or some other variability) is important because no theory successfully explains all the data; and I find it to be the inference to the best explanation available. I find it established that no consistent proof exists of billions of years past.
It's true enough that Christians have used the power of censorship as well as the modern scientific establishment. In an ideal inquiry the truth would be arrived at in time, and perhaps this world does ultimately host an ideal inquiry on any point. If I were writing to constitute positive proof, though, or wanted to act to facilitate others immediately in believing this, I'd be much more thorough (and might still, but it's not a priority); instead I conceived of writing here to seek the best proofs stated of the alternative, and I'm coming to the conclusion the community has very little. (If I wanted to pass as an evolutionist I could fake a pretty good argument myself and at least give the OP a run for its money.)
But it's clear that the community is not that interested in "prove me wrong" framing: as a group, they prefer the stock-exchange version where everyone screams at the top of their lungs and somehow business gets done in spite of it. So I'll keep that in mind.