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/* Where does Wikipedia get it's sources on the Earth's age and related date estimates */ unsigned and reply to TomMoore
"The fungi/bacteria hypothesis that 14C in coal is produced by modern microorganisms currently living there may also be plausible, but would probably only contribute to inflation of 14C values if coal sits in warm damp conditions exposed to ambient air. There is also growing evidence that bacteria are widespread in deep rocks, but it is not clear that they could contribute to 14C levels. But they may contribute to 13C.)"[http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/c14.html]
{{unsigned|TomMoore}}
:"''I have heard some YEC claim that the whole universe was created at the same time, including the Earth. What exactly is the hypothesis here?''": See [[Starlight problem]]. No, it would not be fairly stated as you proposed.
:"''But you don't create the hypotheses and assume that your current data must be flawed.''": Nobody is doing that. That is, it is not ''data'' that is assumed to be flawed, but ''assumptions''. To put it another way, there is ''data'' that indicates that the ''current assumptions'' are flawed, so new hypotheses are proposed. But sceptics, not liking the new hypotheses, are charging that YECs are proposing things that they are not proposing, such as changes in the laws of physics.
:"''[Setterfield] didn't have any evidence or reason to believe it''": Yes he did. He had historical measurements of the speed of light that appeared to be showing a decrease. In fact, the possibility that the speed of light ''had'' decreased had been discussed decades earlier, precisely because the data ''appeared'' to be showing that.
:"''...evidence to contradict that must be proportionately large as well.''": True, and that is what Setterfield attempted, but ultimately failed to convincingly do. But whilst anti-creationists were saying "you can't change constants" and "you can't extrapolate those measurements back that far", others, including YECs, were properly investigating his claims and ultimately most rejected them.
:"''The creationist "theory" is always that God created everything at some unagreed-upon point...''": That's a gross over-simplification.
:"''It's not very good science.''": What ''is'' good science when it comes to proposing unrepeatable unique past events? Is "nothing exploded and became everything" good science?
:"''In the sense that you intend, that is accurate. I am crippled by my insistence on only reading reputable publications like ''Scientific American'' and ''Nature''.''": The problem is that those publications are ''not'' reputable publications ''when it comes to learning about young-Earth creationism''. If you never want to argue against creationism, that may be okay, but if you want to argue against it—as you are doing—wouldn't it be better to go to the source, i.e. creationists themselves, to find out just what the arguments are?
:"''What I meant to say was that the formation of strata in the earth leads to consistent results...''": So you weren't really replying to the point, instead sidestepping onto a point of your own. And I reject that it ''does'' lead to consistent results.
:"''...the biological explanation of millions of years correlates and is consistent with the geological one...''": Only after frequently changing such dates over more than 100 years. I recall someone saying that the problem with the supposedly-accurate mainstream dates was that they kept changing! However, this was an older bloke, and it appears to me that by now they've largely stopped changing (i.e. apart from some fine tuning), but the point is that biologically-derived dates were grossly different to geologically-derived dates, which were grossly different to radiometrically-derived dates, until they managed to find reasons to alter them until they reached a compromise to settle on. So is the concordance real, or contrived? I suspect the former. And sometimes there is circularity involved, with rocks often being dated by the fossils in them and fossils often being dated by the rocks they are in.
:"''Its graph has a pretty sharp step there...''": It isn't that sharp, and the graph is not to scale anyway.
:"''Wow, didn't take long. ... Dr. Harry Grove, states that "the 14C in coal is probably produced de novo by radioactive decay of the uranium-thorium isotope series''": That's Dr. ''Gove'', by the way. I don't even follow what it means, because C14 is not part of the uranium-thorium series. Perhaps he means that radioactive decay knocks neutrinos out of nitrogen atoms in the coal? Even so, is this new C14 from surrounding radioactivity allowed for in all other C14 measurements? Or is it, as I mentioned before, a case of special pleading?
: But even assuming this is a legitimate hypothesis, what we have are two competing hypotheses: One, that C14 is being newly created. Two, that coal is less than 100,000 years old (the upper limit of C14 dates). No YEC is saying that C14 in coal in and of itself absolutely proves the YEC view. Rather, it is one more bit of ''scientific evidence'' in support of the YEC view. But the general response is that explanation 2 is ruled out because there ''exists'' an alternative ''possibility'' (explanation 1).
: [[User:Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]] 00:00, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
== Young earth cosmology ==
