> The Christian creationist movement has plenty of people from the hard sciences with PhD's precisely because it is defensible, logical and evidence based.
Is flawed logic in itself.
I had a wonderful teacher in Civil Engineering with a PhD in Engineering and immense skill in the computation of harmonic wind induced vibrations in truss frames and other such things.
They also had a strong personal belief in young earth and other creationalist notions for which they had no professional background or grasp of radioactive dating whatsoever.
People with STEM PhD's are not immune to error or projecting expertise beyond their experience and qualifications.
That is true, going outside of areas of expertise is fraught with risk. The best creationist material on radioactive dating was published by the RATE group. We include a summary of this material in an appendix of the book.
If you use a philosophical uniformitarian interpretation of the amount of process that has occurred on earth or in the cosmos, you will get a figure of hundreds of millions of years or even billions of years. We do not dispute the amount of process. We deny philosophical uniformitarianism, which is an atheistic presupposition. The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).
Alternatively for reasonable interpretations of calcite deposition rates, other mineralisation layering rates, uranium series decay rates, and other STEM processes it's clear the earth is at the very least more than 40,000 years old wrt human activity:
It's a philosophical argument of the truthiness of texts recording goat herders begetting goat herders Vs rates of change in observable physical features of the earth.
The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).
All origins systems are underpinned by unprovable presuppositions, including atheistic origins accounts, the biblical origin account, and so on. Origins accounts have to be logically compatible with science and have explanatory power. Philosophical uniformitarianism is an atheistic presupposition. It is more in the realm of philosophy than science, yet it has a significant bearing on how atheists interpret scientific evidence, especially in the origins domain.
> The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).
So, when you say Christian creationism is “evidence based”, you mean a “reasonable interpretation” of a text with a whole litany of direct internal inconsistencies, and which itself has no evidence (leaving aside personal faith) of being anything other than a collection of mythology, supports it and not, you know, actual material evidence?
Christians and some prominent secular scientists agree that the origin of life on earth is a miracle. One group posits a Divine miracle. The other a secular miracle. Abiogenesis is foundational to the secular origins account. Before abiogenesis occurs, the mechanisms of biological evolution cannot be invoked. George Wald, Nobel Prize winner called abiogenesis both impossible and implied it was a miracle. Francis Crick implied it was a miracle. Fred Hoyle, atheist, calculated a probability for abiogenesis of 10 raised to the power of negative 40,000. Eugene Koonin in about 2012, invoked the multiverse as an infinity to try to make abiogenesis seemingly plausible. He calculated the probability of the RNA world hypothesis at less than 10 raised to the power of negative 1000. It has been labelled the hardest problem in biology. The most celebrated atheist of the twentieth century, Anthony Flew, left atheism when he realised the impossibility of abiogenesis and became a theist of some sort. If you need a miracle to explain abiogenesis, as these secular authorities have said, then the secular origins account is not as rigorously "scientific" as some might suppose.
That is broadly true, although there are creationist organisations within the Roman Catholic world. The major creationist organisations are evangelical (Protestant).
