Any evidence that the Earth is more than 6 or 10 tousand years old would suffice to refute Young Earth Creationsism. But proponents of OEC accept that the Big Bang occured and the Earth is billions of years old (the 6 “days” of Genesis being much longer time periods) and life evolved (or were different “kinds” created and different times?), but all hominid remains are from extinct apes, including neandertals (do I have that right?). But cro-magnon remains and all other archeological artifacts are from people descended from Adam and Eve, who still were products of special creation in keeping with the Bible story.
It’s not easy to convince any creationsist that radiometric isotope dating is accurate, or that DNA mapping means anything. So what are some more straightforward pieces of evidence that this admittedly more refined hypothesis nevertheles cannot be true?
Note, that OEC is just one of those crack pot ideas that you really don’t have to refute at all. Since their claims go against a huge pile of evidence, it is their job to refute all that evidence.
E.g., someone walks up to you and say they have an elephant in their pocket. You don’t have to provide any proof at all against it. If it were true, they could show you the elephant in their pockets. If they can’t prove their claim, then you can ignore their claim.
You said it yourself - Young Earth Creationists don’t accept carbon 14 dating or other radioactive decay methods, and are unlikely to accept anything else you show them, however straightforward. They will simply attack the evidence, attack your inferences or declare that God make things that way to test the faith of humankind.
A nice example is the case of ice cores.
You can drill ice cores from the polar caps, count the layers caused by annual snow fall, and show that counting back, you can find acid contamination from known volcanic eruptions such as Agung (1963), Krakatoa (1883), Vesuvius (79 AD).
By counting the layers in the ice cores and then showing that the counts correspond with these known eruption dates, you can show that the layers therefore correspond with years. Then you can show that there are hundreds of thousands of layers, and therefore the Earth is older than 6000 years. Don’t expect to convince anyone though.
There are similar examples - sea bed deposits, glacial lake deposits (varves), tree ring data (you can overlap the patterns of tree ring thicknesses from ancient and fossil wood with living trees right up to the present, and bear in mind that the oldest living tree is 4000 years old), but it will all be dismissed by YEC.
Not from where I’m standing! Your POV may be different.
Guess I should have read the OP more carefully. The OEC belief is harder to refute than YEC because it dovetails more neatly with archaological evidence, and because the OEC believers have conveniently chosen to ignore the most powerful evidence against them. Ignoring DNA mapping is like ignoring the footprints of a man with different-sized feet and a crutch.
You could ask why if all humans have the same pair of ancestors we don’t all have the same hereditary diseases - why don’t we all have sickle-cell anaemia for example, or the same skin colour come to think of it. If the answer is that these diseases/adaptations were the result of mutations in the descendants of Adam and Eve, you have to ask why they postulate a unique creation rather than evolution from earlier ancestors.
If I’m reading the OP correctly, the question isn’t about refuting Young Earth Creationism–which is the line of thought most commonly called “Creationism,” and which insists on a literal interpretation of Genesis.
The question seems to be about another line of thought called Old Earth Creationism. From the way it’s described here, it seems like Old Earth Creationists accept scientific evidence about the origins of the world and the universe, except that they believe that God played some role in shaping humanity’s past. In this way, the Old Earth Creationist can maintain a traditional belief that human beings were intended for some special purpose by a divine creator, but at the same time avoids the fairly absurd arguments that Young Earth Creationists engage in–for an Old Earth Creationist, there’s no need to insist that dinosaur bones were placed on the Earth to test men’s faith, or that the Grand Canyon was carved out during the Great Flood, etc., since the Old Earth Creationist has no problems with the scientific evidence as it’s interpreted by the scientific community (and most other reasonable folks).
So, it looks like the main question is, how do you refute the OEC claim that sometime in the distant past, humanity was shaped by a divine creator (or at least infused with a soul by a divine being)?
For that, I’m afraid I don’t have an answer, and I’m not sure if there is one. When it comes down to it (“it” being the role of a god in shaping or guiding humanity’s history), it’s a question of faith, and there’s probably no way to scientifically prove or disprove it.
ftg got it right. If the old Earth Creationists make an assertion about their own data, then that assertion can be refuted. The problem is, THERE IS NO DATA. There are only passages from the Bible. If there is any phsycal evidence for the existence of Adam and Eve, I’d love to see it.
One of the lynchpins of OEC is the distinction between “macroevolution” and “microevolution” - that is, they will accept that microevolution occurs (thereby explaining such facts as the emergence of pesticide-resistant insects and antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains), but will not accept that macroevolution occurs (e.g., the emergence of new major traits of taxonomic groups).
The micro-macro dichotomy (as used by OECs) is flawed, however, as they do not represent different mechanisms, but are essentially different ways of looking at the same processes. Microevolution deals with individuals and populations, while macroevolution deals with species and higher taxonomic groups.
Regardless of scale, the predominant driving mechanism is still natural selection, and Darwin did well enough in formulating the logic whereby millions of years worth of gradual changes can add up to significant differences between previous biological forms and current forms. Most OECs, I’d wager, have never actually read Darwin’s Origin, and choose not to accept his arguments on the basis of hearsay and second- or third-hand refutations (rather like YECs, actually…), rather than careful consideration.
Matt, the ice core samples are just what I had in mind for refuting YECs, but OEC will accept will accept the time-frame they indicate. I’m looking for something similar, but associated with modern humans, like an archaelogical site that couldn’t possibly be less than tens of tousands of years old.
Darwin’s Finch, I kinda need some clarification as to whether OECs accept the evolution of other living things in the course of the OE time frame. The issue of microevolution might be moot. But as I understand it, regarless of what else happened, the story of Adam and Eve is considered true.
OEC is too much a grab bag for there to be any easy boilerplate arguments that will work against all stripes.
You’d be best served by working out the clearest ways to explain the genetic arguments. If they do assert that Adam & Eve are real people and all humans are their descendants, you might try attacking form the angle of present genetic diversity and the mutation rates that would be required to achieve that.
At best, Adam and Eve could originally have only four alleles per locus. (Since Eve would technically be a clone of Adam, it should only be two alleles per locus, but lets be nice, anyway.) All other alleles would have to arise by mutation. Then you bring up the Major Histocompatibility Complex- a large array of genes with 50 or more alleles per locus used to identify Self v Non-Self tissue. Several thousand new non-neutral, non-deleterous alleles had to arise via mutation since “Day 6”?
YEC is essentially “special creation”, which is the belief that all life was created, as described in Genesis. Very minor changes might occur within a species, but that’s about the extent of biological change allowed for by YECs. Evolution pretty much does not occur at all, according to such beliefs. The time frames required for evolution to accomplish anything substantial simply aren’t available, since the Earth is only accepted to be ~6,000 years old.
OECs realize that the mass of data supporting an old Earth - and the fact of evolution, for that matter - directly contradict a literal reading of Genesis. Thus, they allow for a concept of “deep time”, and they allow for the idea that evolutionary processes can account for some, but not all, of what we see biologically today. Despite allowing for longer time frames, however, OEC is still creationism, which implies that divine fiat, not evolution, is primarily responsible for the diversity (and presence) of life on Earth. Some evolution certainly occurs (even if only in the most reductionist sense of “changes in alleles in a population”), but the origins of new forms and the appearance of new traits are still ascribed to divine creation for the most part. Some of the less literal-minded OECs might even allow for the evolution of “lesser” animals and plants, while insisting that Man was specially created by God. For other OECs, the fossil record may serve as “evidence” of Biblical creation spread out over geological time (and, naturally, culminating in our own Sixth Day appearance). In either case, I would suspect that Adam & Eve are regarded as having actually existed.
Note that other attempts to reconcile evolution and theology, such as the belief that life evolved but God intervened at some point to bestow upon one specific primate branch a “soul”, I would not consider to be creationism per se.
Well, you can always refute god, but that never gets very far. Either they won’t define the term, they’ll move the goalposts, or they’ll just ignore you. Other than that there is no simple refutation for the addition of an unnecessary and unprovable step in the logical chain, but then the burden isn’t on disproof. If they want to say that X is a perfectly good explanation, but X happened because of god, it is up to them to prove their case.
This is the viewpoint that I’m targeting, where the departure on biblical grounds from conventional science is limited to the origin of modern humans. One of our orthodox Jewish members asserted that cro-magnon man is considered descended from Adam and Eve and that all other hominid species are extinct apes (is that the position of the Catholic Church as well?). This can be refuted by showing that cro-magnons existed more than 10,000 years ago or that they shared a common ancestor with other hominids. I’m looking for something that can reinforce the evidence provided by radiocarbon dating and DNA mapping and is easily understood, a “bloody glove” if you will.
I figured that out when my trademark delayed-action reading comprehension kicked in. And you can find plenty of such examples, IF you are prepared to accept radiocarbon dating, or thermoluminescent dating of ceramics, or other dating methods. But even if you do, you won’t get anywhere because the OEC can shift their ground.
Here is what appears to be an OEC paper that DOES accept radiocarbon dating and other archaeological dating methods, but avoids biblical contradiction by stating that the genealogies in Genesis are not continuous and were never intended to be.
The paper is rather long so I shall quote a few relevant bits:
**"WHY WE FIND NO CONTRADICTION
BETWEEN THE GENESIS 11 GENEALOGY
AND ANCIENT ARCHAEOLOGY
Now, how are we to deal with the genealogy in Genesis 11:10-26, which so many Christians have supposed is a "time-tight’’ package? We accept the Bible as fully inspired by divine guidance to the writers, so we cannot read this genealogy as leaving room for long periods of human history unless legitimate principles of biblical interpretation allow it…
SNIP
…The basic explanation of the manner in which extended periods of time are included in the genealogy of Genesis 11:10-26 is that the list of patriarchs given in these verses was never intended to include all the steps in Abraham’s family line, and that the numbers of years of age given are not really arranged in a "time-tight’’ succession…
SNIP
…nearly all the genealogies in the Bible concentrate on the most outstanding or best-remembered patriarchs and omit some often many others in the chain of descent…
… in biblical genealogies the expression "the son of’’ a certain, named father does not necessarily mean “a first generation son of.’’ Therefore, we should be at perfect liberty to understand, for example, Gen 11:16-17, as follows: “And Eber lived thirty-four years, and begot the family line which ended in [that famous patriarch whom the Hebrews remember as] Peleg”… so there may have been many generations between Eber and Peleg”**
This paper claims that Cro-magnon archaological sites are dated correctly and that any such sites must have been post-Flood, since the Flood would have been way too destructive for any traces of pre-Flood mankind to have survived. However, he denies that the Bible implies any hard dates to the Flood so there are no conflicts with archaological dating. It’s pretty hard to refute somebody’s divine text when their interpretation of said divine text is conveniently modified to fit existing evidence.
The day-age version of OEC is based on a very superficial reconciliation of the creation account against a very general picture of the actual physical evidence; anything beyond a cursory glance immediately shows that they sequence of creation events in Genesis does not actually match the sequence of appearance of life on Earth as understood from the fossil record; Specifically:
Genesis describes seed-bearing plants and trees (day 3) as preceding animal life in the waters (day 5), also, birds are described as preceding land animals; the physical evidence strongly contradicts these two sequences.
And if the Big Bang occured on Day 1, what time period did the 7th day encompass, given that each “day” was upwards of 2 billion years?
Matt, that’s a new one. It’s amazing how far some people will stretch the Bible to fit the science that they’ll accept. Where does the Ice Age fit into this cosmology?
And I’m curious as to what extent different creationist beliefs–apperance-of-age, catastrophism, time compression, etc.–are debated among creationists.
The essence of the Old Earth Creationist claim seems to be that humans are separate from all other life and are not descended from non-human animals. The evidence for humans being part of the evolutionary tree of life on Earth is as strong as anything in science, and is based on the same fundamental lines of evidence as for evolutionary biology in general: comparative anatomy, comparative molecular biology, and the fossil record. The common descent of all living things is established by an extraordinary number of facts from multiple lines of evidence, and there’s no reason to think the one species Homo sapiens is any different in that respect than all other species of life on this planet. On the contrary, every piece of evidence we know shows that we are mammals, specifically primates, and more closely related to gorillas, chimpanzees & bonobos, and orangutans than any of us anthropoid apes are to gibbons; more closely related to any of the other apes than any of us apes are to monkeys; and more closely related to the Old World monkeys than any of us Old World apes and monkeys are to the New World monkeys; and so on right up through eukaryotes.