You seem to have drifted somewhat from the Creationist/natural history brunt of the original post....

As one who is rather widely read in the sciences and evolution in particular, as well as having been an committed atheist for at least 40 years....

I believe that the Bible is a  creation myth of a primitive group of nomads.   I have a big encyclopedia of mythology at home.  It's full of creation myths...Dozens of them from people all over the world.   One is as good as the other as a narrative tale, and none need be taken seriously.

Let me be succinct.  There is no evidence whatever in support of a literal reading of the Genesis myth, or that the Earth was specially created in toto a mere 6000 years ago.  (News to the Chinese, I suspect, who have written history going back almost 10,000 years...)
Whereas...There is massive and incontrovertible evidence in support of the current scientific paradigm that the universe is some 13.5 billion years old, that our solar system is perhaps 5 billion years old, that life first arose about 3.5 billion years ago, and that from that point on, following the principals of Darwinian evolution, life flourished and diversified into the forms we see today, including ourselves.
Many millions of species have gone extinct over that period of time, and in the cases of at least three major extinction events, as much as 90% of all life on Earth was wiped out, only to re-flourish.

Tell me... Why would a God go to such incredible lengths to fool such easily-fooled beings as ourselves; creating a universe which did not appear to have been created?

Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:07pm:


That's not correct Dan. Mountains and rocks do erode over time, but the reason that we have mountains now is due to plate tectonics.
The pressure between the plates colliding with each other constantly make new mountain chains, while others sink into the ocean. This takes millions of years.

The ocean floor is covered in moutains, canyons, cliffs, plains, etc. Nearly every topography terrain on the surface can be found on the ocean floor.

Rockman wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:23pm:


Rockman I am not sure if you realize this but , it only takes one of the above examples to disprove evolution. And you also did not take consideration of the Flood which caused massive amounts of erosion creating many of the mountains we have today, a more recent example is the mount St.  Hellens explosion, look it up and you will see how little time it takes to change earths landscape.

Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:52pm:

You aren't alone in being Christian, nor are you alone in being a creationist. We have many on this site. You are however the only person that I know of who believes in a young earth.
Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 11:19am:

No contest.
Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:38pm:

Number of chromosomes is not a measure of organismal complexity.
Quote:
Information taken from http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/91/3/221?view=long&pmid=10833048, http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/molgen/, and http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.genet.37.040103.1039.... Quoted from wikipedia, but I check their sources. Did you know that humans develop gills and tails in the womb which disappear before we're born?
Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 11:19am:

Is nothing and an explosion harder to believe than nothing and then light? Objectively they sound pretty similar...
Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 11:19am:

No, it doesn't.
Rockman wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:23pm:
You are both right. Mountains do erode, and plate tectonics does make new crust. The specific principle of plate tectonics that deals with this is seafloor spreading, which combined with the natural movement of the plates combines to renew the mountains over time. The places where the plates are separating are called divergent boundaries. In fact it does too good a job, and the Himalayas are still growing. Another factor is that the Jet stream (which shifts and moves periodically) carries dust across the surface of the earth, and repositions it eroding one spot and building up sediment in other areas before it shifts and repositions the sand/dust all over again.
Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:44pm:

Best i can determine Noah lived in the area where the Dead Sea now is and the great flood encompassed an area twice the current size of the Dead Sea. It's not quite global, but still pretty darn huge. Mt. St. Hellens was a pretty huge explosion that radically reduced the mountain to rubble, but it works both ways. Mountains can be built up and and destroyed.
Bikewer wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 12:48pm:

For the purpose of debate can we say that the beginning of Genesis is a creation myth/story and that the Bible as a whole is a written history filled with their mythic/religious interpretations for the events which happened to the nomads? If we don't it makes this less debatable, and I really don't want this thread to be locked for fighting. It's a very rare case when people refrain from insulting each other before now.

Dan wrote on Aug 25^th, 2010 at 4:07pm:


The key word here is LIVING.
Only a handfull of organisms can survive for milenia. But dead things and organisms (ammonites, trylobites, coal, oil, dinosaurs, early mammanls) go back millions of years ago.

Besides, the very first passage of Genesis is wrong. (I'm parafrasing this) In the beggining, God created the heavens and Earth, and the earth was dissordered and without shape, and darkness covered the abyss.  And the then god said  "let there be light", and there was light. 

To have a planet, you need the sun first, so there was always light.

The decay of radiactive materials has been adressed on the original thread, but I can think of another clock of sort to determine the age of the universe. The Cepheid or standard candles as they have been called.

A cepheid is a star who gives pulsations at a very precise rate, like a interstellar heartbeat. The north star is an example of a cepheid.
So you measure a cepheid, wait some time, measure the cephid, wait some more, measure again and so on. This gives you an pretty good idea of the expansion rate of the universe.

And if you know how fast it is expanding, you can calculate backwards as well. 5 thousand years won't cut it. 10 thousand years won't cut it. Not even 100 thousand or 100 million years.      

It's pointless to debate such issues on a forum like this, as the grounding in the basic scientific principals would take many (many) pages.   For those actually interested in the current science (which refutes all the tired old creationist arguments), I would suggest one book, Richard Dawkins' latest effort The Greatest Show On Earth.   
Unlike The God Delusion which addresses the atheist argument, this one is geared to creationists (or "history deniers" as Dawkins calls them)

Dawkins goes into great detail on the current paradigm of natural history and in a manner that is very accessible to the layman.

For those interested in the critical examination of the New Testament and it's problems, I recommend biblical scholar Bart Ehrman.   
Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities are particularly enlightening.