Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can't argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it's now) which basically uses the same argument.
And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.
Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.
Anything that is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
You can throw as much science at them as you want. God could have just created everything in whatever state he wanted to. Same thing with the virgin mary discussion. Who cares if it makes sense scientifically, god can just make a fertilized egg appear. How lame would god be if he could not do that? This is the basis christians start from, so why even bother trying to debate that?
I genuinely don't understand how uranium can exist a priori in this argument but lead not? I might be missing something.
The original post only gave half the explanation. It's not that lead exists in general, it's that lead exists within zircon crystals.
Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There's no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old
Lead 204 is entirely primordial and the other isotopes found on earth would be found at roughly the same concentration were all of the lead on earth primordial. It's the excess ratios of the other isotopes of lead that can be attributed to radioactive decay. That is a substantial proportion of the lead on earth, but to say the "existence of lead" is proof of the age of the earth is entirely incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_lead
Here's the bad faith argument:
At the moment of creation, God placed some partially decayed metals on the planet to fool the non-believers.
This is basically why the existence of dinosaur bones doesn't bother them either -- they just hand-wave it away.
I'm not even sure how you get to 4000 years old from biblical literalisim.
Edit: going strictly by the biblical account, Adam lived to 930 years, and Noah 950. IIRC, their lives did not overlap. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. A whole bunch of stuff happens in between Noah and Jesus. So even if you're working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
So even if you’re working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
You can't. The "Young Earth" people are morons.
The original calculation (adding up all the ages in the genealogies in the Bible) was done a few hundred years ago, but all the young earth creationists I saw put the start at 4000 A.D., so 6000 years ago.
This proof is partial though. This assumes there is only 1 way of obtaining lead. What if lead appeared from fusion in stars younger than that.
Yeah, subsurface helium would probably have been a better example for this
The correct answer would have been: "Why should I? You're an idiot."
The tragedy is that humans aren't convinced to change their minds by facts like this. They're convinced by good stories from their friends and family.
Dude is gonna come back at him with the first mention of lead in the bible and say, no this is where God created lead, lol.
Look I don't like them either, but you can't refer to crusty bishops that way
I had a dude come up to me at the reference desk and tell me that the earth can’t be billions (he said trillions, lol) of years old because erosion from the Mississippi River would make it wider and deeper than it is. I pulled up some info including the idea that the Mississippi was something that came about more recently because of plate shifting, etc and he just said, "Nah."
I'm not siding with the 4000 year old earth argument, but that is a weak counterargument.
Lead was created by dying stars that long predate the Earth.
