Just one question for young earth creationists.

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Well, no, he is right. Falsifiability is not necessary for verifiability. The confirmation bias is not anything to do with falsifiability or verifiability other than a skewing factor that leads us to unjustly falsify or verify things in a manner to support a pre-existing opinion.

Well, no, false, you seem to be working within a framework where you are assuming that all things that are verifiable must be falsifiable and thus to remove one is to be skewed. Frankly, he is assuming a hypothesis so radical that any thing that it is beyond falsification, like saying that the world will in the future become a socialist utopia, we can argue that this seems more true or more false based upon certain bits of data as is done on religion and a number of other claims, but we can never falsify the claim even though it is perhaps true we will verify the claim when we see it happen. His argument is not difficult to understand honestly.

I don't need a scientific prediction, I made a truth claim that is either true or not. The plastic will turn green at some undefined time for some undefined reason. That is verifiable, but not really falsifiable, and frankly, I never needed to define the reason for the claim or anything like that. It could be a coincidence that what I said was correct, but that has nothing to do with the claim I made or whether an unfalsifiable thing can be verifiable. As twoshots said, falsifiability is only necessary when dealing with science, when making a truth claim, we don't have to be scientific. We just also don't have to have this claim respected by others, but we can still make it even though others may reject it as nonsense.

jfrmeister has fallen victim to one of the classic blunders: an inability to distinguish between a scientific prediction and a proposition.

He's all yours Ag

By what means and with what evidence, would you prove false, the hypothesis that the earth is a few billion years old, and was created by a nothing?

If you can't falsify your hypothesis, then there's no way for you to prove it. If you can't prove it, will you shut up for good?

So let's hear it. How do you prove false, the idea that the world was created by nothing a few billion years ago?

Rigorous science. It has been tried, and the theory that our planet formed from a stellar nebula is currently the one that has taken the most punishment, and came out on top. It formed many billions of years ago (I believe 14 billion years)

If you can show dating, from multiple sources in our solar system and using multiple techniques, that points to a very recent formation, then our hypothesis would be lost.

Your turn..

Read both and think.

What? You're supposed to give a way to either prove or disprove it.

Such as "By showing rocks originating from our planet, and our neighbors, are around the same date in formation"

Which has already been established, and it is not according to the timeline the young earth creationists establish. You lose.

You added the "created by nothing" part. Not all scientists are atheists. You can still believe the world was created by God and accept modern science. A 10,000 year old earth just doesn't fit with reality. It's as absurd as saying the earth is flat. If you insist on such a literal interpretation of the Bible you're going to run into a crisis of faith sooner or later.

Seriously. How can you explain the Grand Canyon?

The ~14 (or 13.7) billion year figure is for time since the Big Bang rather than the age of Earth, which is more like ~4.6 billion.



Falsifiability is important, but I'd say it's not actually the best science can do. Moreover, it's rare to find one magic bullet piece of data to falsify a theory. It's usually possible to rescue a theory when contradictory data are found by stating that the data only falsify some auxiliary hypothesis. For example, imagine if the theory of gravity predicted a certain type of motion and that wasn't quite the one observed. You might imagine that the model of gravity is wrong, or that the mass distribution of the bodies was not what you thought it was, or that your telescope has some systematic measurement error.

The question is then whether the general trend in the data tends to follow the predictions of a theory more or makes it reject auxiliary hypotheses more. If a theory has to be rescued always in an ad hoc manner, it has little credibility.


Anyway, getting a precise estimate of Earth's actual age is a lofty goal, but it seems like what people are really interested in here is whether one can set a lower bound that's very old compared with historical record.

If we just want to test that Earth's age has a lower bound of several million years, we can look at different kinds of radioactive dating. My favorite method is "isochron dating" because it gets around making any assumptions about the initial amount of parent and daughter elements present, and there are few ways it can yield false ages (most errors will cause it to give no age at all, but incoherent data). The few kinds of errors that do yield false ages would cause it to produce false ages that are younger than the actual one (or at least intermediate between two actual ones), so it's really quite good for setting a lower bound on an age (though good for more than that since there are ways to test for this error anyway, but I digress).


So, how would we falsify the lower bounds that radioactive dating sets? Well, the same way we would falsify the inverse square law for electric fields. That is, both theories make numerical predictions that we can test and re-test. Maybe the patterns we've found so far won't hold in the future. If that happens, then we need to re-think things quite a lot. Occasional outliers won't counterbalance a large set of accumulated data, but if our observations start yielding consistently different results than what the theory predicts, the theory would be in trouble. Likewise, if we found this were a special case of some more expansive theory that made different predictions, and those predictions fit new data, then our old theory would be subsumed into the new one.


Therefore, the way to reject estimates that Earth is old is to keep getting data and finding that the trends we find now don't hold in new data, or to come up with an alternate theory that makes its own, separate, testable predictions and also explains the ones that we currently observe.

Your point about scientists not all being atheists is pertinent.

And I'll add that atheists aren't compelled to believe "something has come from nothing". An atheist could say "I don't know," when asked how any given thing happened, and it wouldn't imply that a god was behind it.

Why is there something instead of nothing? I don't know why, and have never heard an answer that didn't just push the question back a step or so.
Why should we expect there to be nothing instead of something?


I reminds me of a silly joke about a philosopher who meets God and can ask one question.
Philosopher: "Why?"
God: "Why not?"

Let me tell you another funny tale. One that happens to be true.

The theory of continental drift was first proposed in 1868 by Antonio Snyder. There's just one snag: he was a young-earth (read, Biblical) creationist. Perhaps that's why his work was ignored until long-agers claimed the credit for the popularisation of the idea a century later.

Utter nonsense.

Antonio Synder-Pelligrini published his idea slightly before Darwin published "Origin of Species" before there were "Biblical creationist"( in the 20th Century sense meaning those who make a creed out of opposing Darwin with extreme Biblical literalism) Scientists still assumed "creation" but had already abandoned the "young earth" part because they were becoming aware of the ancient strata of rocks in the Earth's crust.

His idea was based upon evidence that that contradicted the Bible ( the similiarity of coal deposits millions of years old on two continents).

And his theory wouldn't make any sense on any Earth that was created only 6000 years ago.

How could the continents have have moved 3000 miles in only 6000 years? Europe ad North America would be 75 miles farther apart now than they were when he wrote his book in 1858 if they were really moving that fast.

Wegner expanded upon the idea of continental drift at the turn of the twentieth century, and figured out all of the theoretical continents like Gondwannaland, and Pangea. But his idea was not accepted. Not because of anything to do with Creationism, but because he didn't know of any force that move continents around.

The scientific community finally accepted continental drift in 1970's only because
of cold war era submarine warfare. The latter required detailed mapping of the sea bottom resulting in the discovery of sea floor spreading which lead to the discovery of Plate Tectonics. And continental drift is a logical result of plate tectonics.

Plate Tectonics and sea floor spreading could not exist in a "young earth".

If you assume uniformitarian geology (that things have always been going just as they appear to be going now) you run into serious problems... mountain ranges are eroding faster than they are rising.

The world is more than 6000 years old----end of story!

Maybe it is... but how do you know that it is?

Uniformitarianism is a speculation that cannot be reconciled with observations.

How can the Earth be 6000 years old if there are things on Earth which are more than 6000 years old. We know that there are even trees that are older than 6000 years, we can date them by counting the tree rings.