I'm not trying to cause a massive fecal matter storm, but I'm wondering what you guys use?

Whenever I run into one, I go for unorthodox methods, usually by mentioning stratigraphic layers and their chronologically consistency.

Have you ever watched that movie "Paul"? It addresses the exact same question, to which the answer is "You can't win with these people".

I try to avoid trying intellectual conversation with a young earther, as it never stays intellectual for long.

If we can keep this one civil, I'll keep it open. I'd really rather leave the religion talks to either the Religion forum or /gd/.

With that said, I've found it to be next to impossible to convince anyone of anything if their beliefs are set in faith. Not that their faith beliefs are wrong or should be viewed in a negative lights, it's just that when someone has faith in something they are taking a belief in something that likely has no rational explanation. Trying to move them from their position is like trying to weight lift with an ounce of neutron star material

If they have faith in something, good for them. If a man has no strong convictions, then he sways with the wind.

It might not be so much they don't know the rules, their game has a different set of rules. There are things that science has yet to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt so we have to fill in the blanks here and there with educated guesses for variables beyond simple laboratory conditions. It's like the whole global warming thing. In some senses, the earth is getting warmer, but at the same time on a longer scale it could be getting colder, it's all perspective. Faith in tangible things, or faith in ethereal.

Do you believe in ghosts? I know a lot of atheists and "scientific thinkers" who believe int he possibility of residual presence after death. It's a part of science that we either can't explain or want to explain since we have a hard time coping with loss. It's all a mental game anyway, if you ask me.

You can't reason someone out of an opinion that they didn't reason themselves into.

It's impossible to argue against Satan's involvement with physical sciences.

I use the laws of thermodynamics - I recognize that any work I put in will ultimately be reduced to useless heat, so I conserve my energy and disengage.

I have heard the same thing about arguing with atheists. That knife cuts both ways.

Sorry, not trying to derail the topic. I'm just glad we still live in a free country where
we can believe what we want to believe.

If I may, let me state my belief and how I square it. First of all, I'm not a scientist, but I understand to a degree and appreciate the truths science tells us regardless of anyone's religion. I don't think that science and religion have to be at odds. I also admit that there things among both topics that I don't have an explanation for. Here is what I belive. God created the universe in 6 24 hour days. God created man and woman. As far as dating with radioactive isotopes or however it's done, I also belive these tests to be accurate. How do I square the two? Simply, when God created Adam he created a fully grown man, mature in every respect. The environment he put him in, the Earth, was also fully mature in every way. When Adam was one day old, he looked like a fully grown man. When the Earth was 5 weeks old, it would have looked, perhaps, thousands or millions of years old.
I respect everyone's beliefs and certainly their right to hold them. This is just my view as a Christian.
Flame suit on.

Like the above poster, I also believe the story in Genesis. I believe that God created a mature universe and man in just 6 days. If Adam somehow chopped down a tree on his first day, there would have been many rings inside.

Also, the only channel I watch on TV is the Science Channel. I absolutely love it. Not that it makes me an expert in anything, just saying that you don't need to convince me of anything, I have my faith and I'm fine.

I'm reminded of the West Wing bible quote scene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALd6xCvZgpc

As long as you knowledge that all evidence suggests an "old" universe, and that your belief that is "young" and appears "old" is completely based on faith, then I really have no problem with your opinion.

I really only debate people who claim that the science is "unclear" or that it is "made up" or worst of all "your science is just religion too".

I ask if they know what the council of Nicaea was. If not I walk away. If they do, I ask them if they think it is plausible that the catholic church admitted the book of Genesis because they didn't have a better solution to the age old question of "how did we get here". They usually have never contemplated that the bible was written by men who had imaginations and voted on by the power hungry and corrupt (at the time) Catholic church. There are many books that were worshiped at the time as being the "word of God" which were not included because they did not bode well for the power of the church, or they were not as believable as the ones that were put in the bible. The purpose of the council was give christianity a stable and uniform book of worship by consolidating the books which the Church agreed with, and banning the books that they did not agree with.

http://xkcd.com/54/

Why not use actually valid claims that show the inconsistency of Canon - from the books referred to by Augustine to those referred to by writers hundreds of years later? Of course, none of that changes the fact that the Pentateuch was always around. As much as a like to give some of our resident "Biblist creationists" a hard time, I am just not seeing the validity in your approach. That could be coming from my own bias as a Christian, though.

Nope, as an atheist, I think using false claims to support "your side" of the argument and then saying "well it may be wrong, but most people don't know that" is full of fail.

Being a dentists I guess I am considered at least half scientist and yet I am a christian.
Easiest way to cancel science and religion is to simply say God made it that way from the beginning. Now there is no argument only bickering "no he didn't, yes he did, he doesn't exist, yes he does."
as the saying goes. Those convinced against there will are of the same opinion still.
We don't live in a world that is neutral.
And as a christian who used to argue these points. I came to the realization I was trying to debate people into believing in Jesus so I would fell like I was being an effective christian instead of trying to live out the great commission.

Did God create fossils? If so, why? Did God know that death would come into the world?

Were predators vegetarians before the fall? Were there venomous snakes? Viruses?

An even better question is why would God create a universe to appear old when it really isn't? There is nothing in the Bible that explains this because the entire set of books(handed down tales) that make it up were done by people who believed the earth was <6K years old and had no evidence at the time to prove that wrong. You guys come along later and then try to make excuses for this error. By saying he "made" it look old is the best you can do, because you realize as a rational human being it is in fact much older than 6K years, but to make the leap that "well he just made it look old" than admitting evidence says it's much older so it must be older and the original writers at the time didn't know this is just as ignorant in my opinion as the young earthers who say no to all the evidence about the history of the earth and the history of the development of life. At least they're sticking to the literal translation of the book and believing that evidence doesn't contradict it.

I try to keep theological arguments theological, or just have them contact Bohr_Adam, from now on.

Care to explain? I'm pretty sure that's not the case.

Physics.

A strong blow with a large mass to the head usually straightens them out.

You guys do realize this is a history debate, not science. The science talks about what we see today, not what we saw back then, that's history. Because of this its opinion based. Nobody can prove hard line how old the earth is. Only say we see this, we can test this, and if what we see today holds with what we test then its such and such. But that means we are making assumptions. The more time you put on the end of an assumption the more likely it's not accurate. That leaves an opening for faith in an alternative answer. And of course that alternative answer has implications on how you should run your life and nobody likes that.

I think you have missed my point... so I will copy and paste

"Yes, they can determine its age to a high degree of confidence."

Which sounds pretty close to: the educated guesstimate is close enough that I feel comfortable with it.
The assumption we speak of isn't the rate of uranium decay to lead, its how much uranium and how much lead. Which is where you get the age range and not a hard date. I didn't say these values were anywhere close, only that an assumption is in play. As a general rule a young earth creationist questions many assumptions over the range of sciences. A small ones being carbon dated diamonds, macro vs. micro evolution, irreducible complexity. These prove nothing only raises questions. For a creationist that's a large question, for an atheist probably a fairly small one. This was the point I was trying to make. The different sides put there "high degree of confidence" on opposite things. This canyon can't be jumped and since we are dealing with assumptions I would say people should simply agree to disagree. That's all I'm driving at.

I never have taken it that way. Einstein's theories about the space-time continuum are demonstrated true. GPS is a great example of practically working with corrections for time dilation. These things we see and truly understand in nature are revealed to man in bits and dribbles through scientific processes and study. Time dilation, affected by velocity and/or gravitational fields has been demonstrated real, over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries. Experiments by NIST has demonstrated that a super-accurate cesium clock raised 10 centimeters (into a lower intensity gravity field away from the earth center), changes its rate by one part in 10**17.

So, we have some students look at the Bible, then look at the body of evidence in science, but being slaves to outmoded notions of time, declare that there is conflict, never admitting that time itself can vary in nature. That really comes across as arrogance, thinking that we humans have come so far, and developed so much, that we know enough about nature to debunk the Biblical account of creation. When we fully unravel the mysteries associated with something so simple like time, then we may want to take another shot at understanding the process of creation.

Where the young earthers get off track is demanding that everyone accept THEIR INTERPRETATION of "days" in the Genesis account. They demand that it must correspond to current earth rotation of 24 hours. On the other hand they defend St. Peter's statement that with God a day can be a thousand years. Again arrogance surfaces, and statements that the Divine Creator set light rays in motion headed toward us all from a short distance away (3000 light years), that made it appear that something happened millions of years ago, but actually never really happened at all. No passage in the Bible says that or alludes to the Creator deliberately trying to confuse and confound His highest creation.

That was always a big one for me when I was a Christian.

If god wanted me to believe that the Genesis account was a literal historical event, why would he deliberately trick us by fabricating all of the evidence to suggest that the universe is very, very old? Wouldn't that be the biggest dick move ever, to trick reasonable people into disbelief of your story?

Back then, it was far easier for myself to accept that genesis was not literal than to accept that we have had trickster god who is sending people to hell because they don't believe in a literal adam and eve due to completely contradictory evidence.