My dad doesn't like the fact that I've come to accept the theory of evolution. He always accuses me of unquestioningly "buying into" what scientists say and says I don't apply critical thinking to the problem.
So now I've decided to tackle his claim at the roots.
Virtually all scientific theory can be boiled down to uniformitarianism, which, according to Wikipedia, is the principle or assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It is a first principle of science. It is thanks to uniformitarianism that we know the age of the universe and the earth, which brings me to my next point.
For many years now, the Society has agreed that the earth is billions of years old. In fact, they pride themselves on this and try to distance themselves from young earth creationists.
On the other hand, they espouse teachings that fly in the face of uniformitarianism, such as a global flood that occurred roughly 4,000 years ago. Taking just a single line of reasoning, the flood can be disproved using ice core data that goes back over 400,000 years.
All the creationist counter-arguments to ice core data that I've encountered eventually culminate in an attack on the validity of uniformitarianism. They argue that natural laws didn't behave the same way before the flood, therefore all of science is based upon a false assumption.
So which is it, according to the Society? Is the earth billions of years old and therefore uniformitarianism is true, or did a global flood cover the earth a few thousand years ago and uniformitarianism is a lie?
