Open Challenge: Evidence of a Young Earth

I think you and Brian may be in violent agreement - I'm not sure why he mistook you for a Creationist. You both seem concerned about the potential impact of Creationism on the educational system.I agree with you that Creationist "science" is readily recognized as nonsense by those familiar with science. From my perspective the problem is that the lawyers in legislatures and judgeships and the citizens on school boards are usually poorly equipped when it comes to science, and all Creationism needs to be successful in these venues is to give the impression that there is an active debate within scientific circles. If I detect a difference in your points of view it is that Brian may see this possibility as a greater threat than you.--Percy

Hi, Proph! Wherever you're getting your information, you've garbled it. This particular Creationist argument goes something like this, though note that there are numerous variations: There are a couple problems with this argument.

1. For simplicity, let's say there are exactly 31 million seconds in a standard year. If we add a second to this year it makes the length 31,000,001 seconds. And if we add a second to next year it is also 31,000,001 seconds. As you can see, the length of the standard year is not changing. And if we don't add a second to the following year the length is back to 31,000,000 seconds. The years are not getting longer. It's just that an actual second based on how many times the earth rotates in a single orbit of the sun (neither the rotation nor the orbit are constant) and the second based on atomic time are not quite the same, and so, on average, an actual year is about 0.9 seconds longer than the standard year.
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   I'm avoiding the scientific nomenclature of "solar day" and "Coordinated Universal Time" and so forth because they don't aid understanding of the basic principles.
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2. Somewhat modifying what I just said in point 1, the earth *is* very gradually slowing down. I can't recall the exact figure, but I think it is estimated that the year becomes a couple seconds longer every 100,000 years or so. Notice how different a figure this is from slowing down by a second every year. Billions of years ago earth's day may have been only half as long.

In other words, this is not evidence for a young earth.--Percy