Oil only takes millions of years to form because that’s usually how long it takes the source rocks to get buried deep enough to form liquid hydrocarbons. It would require only minor fudging (by YEC standards) to say that the rocks were created in the oil window and have only been producing oil since creation.
I do think petroleum geology is a great example of something that only really works with an ancient earth, though. Before plate tectonics was really widely accepted, oil companies were basically guessing where to drill based on what limited clues they could find on the surface. The previous theories of how the earth worked failed to make any reliable predictions about what you’d find in the subsurface, and the abiotic oil theory mentioned earlier also failed to reliably predict where you would find oil. Plate tectonics and related developments in sedimentology have been vital in virtually every new oil find since the 60’s and they only work with an ancient earth. Sure, the evidence and nuts n’ bolts are a little esoteric, but it’s unquestionably true that scientists using these theories, which require an ancient earth to work, have been getting amazing results that have kept fuel prices tolerably low for the last decades.
Varves - annual sediment layers in lake bottoms that eventually become rock. We can verify that they are indeed annual by examining pollen grains in them, and there are places where you can drill a core sample containing a single sequence of (many) more than 6000 varve layers, which (absent the Omphalos argument, which makes all discussion pointless), the process must have been ongoing for longer than 6000 years.
There is a fascinating, if limited, field of study (a subset of psychology?) called “Naive Physics.” It describes things that are intuitive…and wrong. Ideas like “Impetus.” Or that if you throw a ball with a big curving motion of your arm, the ball will fly in a curved (sideways) path.
(And, y’know, an airplane taking off from a treadmill…)
Varves are caused by turbulent flow deposits during the Great Flood - never mind that there would have to be 3 fine sediment layers formed every 2 seconds for 300 days for some varve formations. Also, there are some lakes with 30,000 years of layers from present, all datable via carbon dating and correlated with historical and recent history events (atomic bomb tests, volcanic ash layers, etc).
The same goes for ice cores that run to millions of years - the annual pattern is obvious and can be tracked (via oxygen-18 isotope ratios and other physical evidence) from present day back through known or datable events way past the 6500 year limit.
And these can be correlated with dendrochronology back to 11000 years, as noted above.
Any sort of evidence of anything at all can be reconciled with any theory whatsoever if one is prepared to accept sufficiently absurd auxiliary assumptions (this is technically known as the Duhem-Quine thesis). Professional creationists - the sort of people who write books and articles, or give talks defending it - are in the business of doing this, and it is pointless to argue with them. They will generally know about the evidence in favor of evolution or an old Earth quite as well as you do, and will know their way around the relevant logical and rhetorical tricks through which they can be rebutted even better than you, and better than most scientists (who spend their time on science rather than on argumentative ju-jitsu).
However, the vast majority of people who believe in creationism (YEC or otherwise) are not like this, and many of them are likely to be, to some degree, open minded. Their creationism stems simply from the fact that they have never been exposed to any evidence for evolution and an ancient Earth that they can understand, and thus they choose their belief, in this regard, because they trust the word of their local preacher over the word of the high-school science teacher (if he or she dare to teach evolution) or of some snooty expert who uses big words on TV. These are the sorts of people that the OP is interested in reaching, and pointing out (as people keep doing in this thread) that the professional creationists have a contrived rebuttal to every argument in favor of an old Earth is not really to the point. Most regular creationists would probably be quite as capable of recognizing the contrived absurdity of these rebuttals quite as well a non-creationist can, provided the issues could be presented to them clearly. Sadly, this difficult task is rarely attempted: In practice, anti-creationists tend to rely on arguments from authority almost as much as creationists do.
There was a guy in my writers’ club who was a YEC and wrote stories about it, as well as tales involving Adam and Eve and so on. He always insisted that his stories were rejected because the sci-fi magazine editors were against his religion.
Never mind the fact that the stories were just plain wonky, trite, and wooden.
I’m thinking the point is to use facts that can be agreed upon by almost anyone, not evidence that you have to look up and take someone’s word on.
For example, something I’ve considered before to “prove” evolution through natural selection happens is essentially that few people (even religious types) would argue that it’s possible to breed animals to have certain traits, or even that human parents pass on their traits to their children. Perhaps even fewer people would argue that animals can survive to breed better if they suit their environment better. Put the two together and you’ve got useful traits being passed down and becoming more common. Of course this might be full of holes but you could probably use it to explain evolution to someone in a bar without needing to dig up evidence.
I don’t know why I phrased that so badly in both cases. It should essentially be “few people would argue against the idea that it’s possible to breed animals to have certain traits” etc.
