If the earth is young, God created evidence of it being old.

I appreciate Con's taking on such a wide ranging debate. I think it is important to understand the full scope of YEC. I believe everything I have claimed in geology is referenced in standard texts like Renton's "Planet Earth," and also in his college-level geology course on DVD, "The Nature of Earth." http://www.teach12.com... In the following, when I claim there is "no way" I mean there is no method known to science. 1. Sandstone starts with sand. The process to get sand-sized grains from disintegrating granite takes millions of years, and there is no other process. There is no way to transport the very large quantities of sand required in less than millions of years. Sand only moves when there is active rushing water, not deep under water. The grains must be fused into sandstone in millions of years under high pressure. 2. Limestone is composed of calcium carbonate. The only source for that is the skeletons of sea creatures, mainly tiny diatoms. To get that many takes millions of years. Fusion of the particles into stone take millions of years under high pressure. 3. Limestone caves are not created by erosion. They are made my water seeping into tiny cracks. The picks up CO2 and is very slightly acid, so it slowly dissolves the rock over millions of years. 4. Stalactites could not have been formed by erosion. they are deposited by very slow evaporation of dripping water. 5. The Grand Canyon, for example, is thousands of feet deep. It took 4.5 million years to erode the sandstone with a continuously flowing river. there is no mechanism for it to happen in 40 days. 6. We can observe now how fast the freeze-thaw cycle breaks large large rocks into small ones. It takes millions of years to get what we have. 7. Granite is really hard. It weathers at the rate of an inch every 100,000 years. Observed weathering could be from a flood. 8. Wood is held in place by being quickly buried in mud. Lack of air keeps in from rotting. The mineralization process takes millions of years. 9. If flooding caused the effects equivalent to those of glaciation, we would see the effects in tropics, which we don't. Mountains nearer the poles show more effects than those below the latitudes where glaciers reached in the ice ages. Besides, floods have very little effect on granite. 10, Oops, I meant efflorescence, a process that flakes off the surface of rocks in desert areas. "As groundwater evaporation [through the rocks] continues just below the surface and more salts precipitate, the growth pressure exerted by the crystals causes cracks to form parallel to the surface." (Renton, op cit) The flakes fall off as "talus." It is an incredibly slow process that does not occur at all under water. 11. If you shake up some stuff in water, the light stuff goes to the top. That's not what we see in sediment layers. The layers include very light materials like pollen and, in estuaries, fish scales in layers with heavier materials. The types of pollen and fish scales in a particular layer indicate both the season and the climate when the layer was formed, providing a climate record back more than 30,000 years. A flood would not disperse spring pollen in separate layers from winter pollens, repeating over many thousands of layers. 12. the ice cores are from Antarctica and Northern Greenland, where there has never been any thawing at all. The variations come from seasonal precipitation patterns. Moreover, the trapped CO2 cross-checks accurately with radiocarbon dating. 13. Volcanic activity does not work nearly quickly enough to create islands in less than a very long time. The lava is too viscous to flow quickly. A new Hawaiian island is building and is fairly near the ocean surface, but still will not emerge for 30,000 years. 14. Continental drift carries once-contiguous deposits of sandstone far apart. Volcanism does not create sandstone. Moreover, volcanism cannot move whole continents around quickly. The contents are still moving at about an inch per year. That tracks with the motion of the Hawaiian Islands over 65 million years, with the oldest islands have weathered the most. If the water came out of the ground, then that was clearly divine intervention as there is no physical law that accounts for that. Also ordinary water has no where near enough energy to move a continent. Note also that the continents have drifted apart and then back together many times. One flood, even a miraculous one, could not do that. 15. Rock doesn't float, so water cannot raise mountains. 16. A natural nuclear reactor in Africa has been used to establish that radioactive decay rates have been constant for billions of years. Nothing affects rates of radioactive decay: not melting, not chemical reaction, not vaporization. http://en.wikipedia.org... If something did affect decay rates it would have to speed up some isotopes by a factor of a million, on down to others by a factor of ten, and each in such a way that the dates each produced still agreed with each other. there are some theories that decay rates might be changing with the expansion of the universe, by an amount too small to detect. If so, that wouldn't provide the large factors needed, and it would be the same for all isotopes, not the widely differing factors needed. 17. Coral grows with seasonal variations. The seasons are determined by the orbit of the earth, not weather. 18. The magnetic field reversals occurred at significantly different times, captured in different lava flows. One period of mass volcanism would show the same magnetic field in all lava flows. 19. The distance to stars is most readily determined by simple geometry. The angle to the star is measured in one season, then six months later when the earth is one the other side of its orbit. That gives the distance to many stars proving an old earth. Another method, for distant stars, uses "standard candles" like type 1a supernovas. The brightness of the star is determined by its observed physical properties, and then the distance by the apparent brightness. http://www.talkorigins.org... Red shift is not a primary method. If the speed of light has been measured using astronomical objects far from earth, so we know it is not different away from earth. If it were, that would be an inexplicable violation of special relativity and we would consequently lose most of modern physics. General relativity says that light is affected by gravity, but the effect is far too small to detect with earth's gravity. It is observed by light being deflected by stars. Gravity affects the direction, not the speed. 20. Material like rock can indeed be folded without breaking, due to properties of plasticity. Basically, if it is bent slowly enough while under pressure it doesn't crack. Folds are often observed in sedimentary rock, which was never heated after formation. Continental drift depends upon an underlying plastic layer upon which the continents "float" -- but only very, very slowly. Currently there is only enough water on earth to account for a flood 200 feet higher than current sea level. http://science.howstuffworks.com... If the flood eroded the tops of 15,000 mountains, then something inexplicable added an enormous amount of water, then removed it. Moreover, there is no process by which 40 days of water could do anything measurable to granite, or even sandstone. One could blast a fire hose on granite for 40 days and nothing would happen beyond it getting wet. Granite weathers mainly due chemical attack from the atmosphere on the non-quartz components, a slow process. Keep in mind that if each of the 20 items cited is the result of some error, then the next thing to explain is why all the errors are consistent. Sediment layers agree with isotope dating and so forth. The resolution is affirmed.