Young earth creationism is probable

Thanks Con. I. Preface: I am rather surprised Con has so far pretty much dropped my arguments from presuppositionalism, as they are the most fundamental and important ones I have brought to the table so far. A piece of factual evidence means nothing alone until you interpret it with your logic and reasoning, but if you do not know your logic and reasoning are valid then once again, the interpretation means nothing, nada, zilch, zero. Without grounding his worldview Con has pretty much satisfied P1 of my argument, which I will expand upon some more along with refuting my opponent's points. II. Presuppositionalism Presuppositionalism is not what your initial bias is, but is what you ground your logic and reasoning into. According to scripture, as I provided in round 1, God provides innate knowledge of his existence into the minds of all people. He has made it known for certain that he exists, and because God by his nature is logical, then logic and reasoning is grounded in our knowledge of him. I ask my opponent: "Is is possible for you to be wrong about everything you claim to know?" If the answer is no, then it follows that Pro cannot know ANYTHING whatsoever. As such he cannot justifiably make knowledge claims about ANYTHING. The reason for this is a rather simple reducio ad absurdism which can be expressed in two ways. First, if one can picture the entirety of knowledge, EVERYTHING that could ever possibly be known, and ever known. You can imagine this will be a staggeringly large number of things, many orders of magnitude greater than what you can ever even CLAIM to know! Now ask yourself the question, what are the chances of anything, anything whatsoever, in this enormous bubble of the entirety of knowledge, that will contradict with each thing in this tiny bubble of what you claim to know. That's right, it's a virtual certainty. Second, justifications for knowledge claims are made in terms of other knowledge claims, you know X because of Y. You know Y because of Z. You know Z because of A B and C. Each progressive knowledge claim, because Con has not grounded his knowledge claims in with something of absolute certainty, is therefore an increasingly conjectural, and hence increasingly uncertain. Quickly you can see any and all knowledge claims made without presupposing the worldview of God and Scripture are unsound, and leads to absurdities as I have described. Con may argue that we should presuppose the reasoning and logic he and the people he cites uses are valid, okay fine, tell me how we could demonstrate that their reasoning and logic are valid to even one percent?! And how would this be possible without breaking into a viciously circular reasoning cycle. I have already stated my axiom, and the reasoning why it is a strong one in the first round. Axioms are self-evident truths, that can never be false. From the above reasoning I described how without such an axiom, you break into self-defeating logical positions. In the case of God and Scripture, for one to think they are wrong is as self defeating as to make the following claim: "This sentence is false" Such a statement we can never fulfil the conditions of it's own statement, or undermines it's only intelligibility. As for the case of God & Scripture, to assuming these are false is the same as assuming true to be false, and vice versa, it is a non-sensical statement. Thereby it is a self-attesting truth. Which is an important distinction with axioms over bare assertions. Without addressing this very important argument, Con's entire case falls to pieces. For not only are the dates revealed by scripture clear-cut, but also the other physical evidences stand, as all rebuttals are based off self-refuting world-views. II. Helium diffusion I have seen bad rebuttals before, but I have never ever seen a highly detailed, well written rebuttal that has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE EVIDENCE I PRESENTED!!! My evidence was regarding the helium diffusion rates if zircon crystals, and not from the earth's mantle/crust, and it has nothing to do with the level of helium found in today's atmosphere. Despite it being yet another valid way of determining the age of the Earth, it is off-topic for the purposes of this specific debate. The argument for zirconium crystals is rather simple, the zirconium crystals contained within them a high concentration of helium gas generated by radioactive decay. Now, to account for this high concentration of 'trapped' helium gas (which will inevitably diffuse out over time, as it is such a tiny molecule), either the material's diffusion rate must have been obscenely small (as indicated by the graph previously shown, nearly a million times slower), or the material itself was very young. So when the diffusion rates were actually measured, and then compared with the concentration of trapped helium, the age of the materials must have been significantly younger than those suggested by secular scientists. Because if these diffusion rates were true, and Earth was billions of years old, then these crystals would contain essentially zero helium, as it would all have completely diffused out already. [1] It's very similar to what happens to helium balloons when you leave them. Take an air balloon and a helium balloon, and leave them side by side. The helium balloon very quickly, within days will have sagged and deflated. What is happening here is the helium is actually diffusing through the plastic itself of the balloon's material. Helium is the smallest elemental/molecular entity extant at room temperate under standard conditions, as such it is one of the most diffusable substances in the world. Con seems to attempt to attack how these rates were measured. Well ignoring the fact that these rates would have to be measured several orders of magnitude lower in order to conform with an old earth world-view, Con provides nothing of substance to talk about in this matter. Moreover these have nothing to do Earth's atmospheric helium concentrations. III. Supernova remenants First of all, I am somewhat annoyed and perplexed that Con would literally copy and paste 3,500 characters verbatim from his reference to his argument here. If anything this is borderline plagarism, referenced or not, as it significantly reduced the leg work that must be done to make one's arguments. There is a reason why copy/pasted wiki arguments are rarely done on DDO... It is not cool. Anyway, please note that these lengthened timings for the rate of supernova remenants are made with the assumption that that the universe is old. According to both worldviews, when the universe was younger, the rate of supernova explosions would have been substantially greater than what we observe today. This is because 1. there were more stars that could explode and 2. There is evidence that nuclei were less stable in the past, as is evidenced by Dr. Humphries RATE project's work on the decay rates of minerals in granite, and other materials. [2,3] Moreover these results regardless heavily contradict an old Earth even if true, as it would still set the age on on the order of thousands, not billions of years. IV. Spinning galaxies: Con asks how they relate to a young universe, and the answer is simple: P1. If the universe is old, and the galaxies are spinning at their current rates, with the observable mass, THEN said galaxies would have long spun themselves apart P2. Said galaxies have not spun themselves apart C. The universe is not old (assuming the spinning rates and observable mass are correct) The galaxies simply are simply spinning too fast, and with too little mass, to stay together as we see them if the universe is old.[4,5] Therefore the universe must be young, and galaxies simply have not had the time to fling themselves apart yet. This contention I will bolster with another, very similar yet very important piece of evidence, the galaxies themselves are winding up much too fast.[6] That is, the very presence of spiral galaxies such as the one linked below falsifies an old universe. If these galaxies were spinning as observed, then clearly these galaxies would become featureless disks. The reason is because the insides of the galaxy will rotate faster than the outsides of the galaxy (akin to how an ice skater spins faster when he/she pulls their arms in). This would not be a problem were the stars connected to each other by a rigid connection (like spokes on a bicycle), or with a substantial amount of mass, but neither of these are the case with galaxies. Only a handful of rotations, fewer than 8, would completely wreck the spiral structure of these galaxies, which is significantly less than what is required of an old universe.[7] Therefore, an old universe is handily falsified. http://www.nasa.gov... V. Conclusion Thoth the resolution, and my burden of proof are plenty affirmed, moreover my most important argument, the one from presuppositionalism has gone virtually untouched. Con has his work cut out for him in the next round VI. References: 1. http://creation.com... 2. http://creation.com... 3. Young helium diffusion age supports accelerated nuclear decay, in Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Vol II: Results, Vardiman, Snelling, and Chaffin, editors, Institute for Creation Research/Creation Research Society, El Cajon, CA, chapter 7, pp.25"100, 2005 4. http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu... 5. http://www.universetoday.com... 6. Scheffler, H. and H. Elsasser, Physics of the Galaxy and Interstellar Matter, Springer-Verlag (1987) Berlin, pp. 352-353, 401-413 7. http://www.creationism.org...