Lara, I know that you knew about carbon-14 half-lives. I put that in for the readers who weren't as scientifically literate as you are.
Circular arguments, Lara? Let me present you with one from the "other side" of the question.
YEC: How do you date the fossils found in solid rock?
Evolutionist: By the rock strata the fossils are found in.
YEC: How do you date the rock strata?
Evolutionist: By the artifacts found in them.
You object, I'm sure. So let me point you to an experiment performed by the RATE group (
(here is their home website) for information on dating methods.
In 2000, rock samples were taken from Mt. Ngauruhoe, located in the center of New Zealand's North Island. These samples were from the eruptions on February 11, 1949, June 4, 1954, june 30, 1954, July 14, 1954, and February 19, 1975. They were sent to the Geochron Labortories in Cambridge, Massachusetts for whole-rock potassium-argon dating. The samples were sent on three different occasions, giving the lab plenty of raw material to work with. The samples were not described or identified except as probably being very young rocks with very little argon in them. This would ensure that the lab would take extra care during analysis.
These rocks had been formed from volcanic activity between twenty-five and fifty-one years prior to testing. The lab returned results between "less than 270,000 years old" and "3.5 million years old."
That's not even close, Lara. It seems to me that the reliability of the potassium-argon dating method is at least questionable and at most totally useless.
And if the half-life of uranium-235 is 700,000 years, why hasn't it all decayed down to inert matter and isotopes in the last 4.5 billion years?
For an example of dating items by the strata in which they were found, please examine Eugene DuBois, the man who found "Java Man" in 1891. He claimed that the skull cap he found was from the Trinil layer, which at the time he dated as being pre-Pleistocene. But DuBois was a medical doctor at the time, not a geologist. He was not qualified at that time to make that call. In 1948, Alan Houghton Brodrick (a famous paleoanthropolgist) wrote that the dating of the Trinil beds was still not clear; therefore, DuBois' dating of Java Man was at best a random guess.
On top of that, the femur which is nearly always associated with the skull cap was found a year later and fifty feet away (a figure with which DuBois was not consistent over his lifetime). Anatomists of today - and of DuBois' day - believe that the femur did not belong to the skull fragment. By the end of his life, DuBois was almost alone in his insistence that they were from the same species, if not from the same subject.
DuBois also had in his possession two modern human skulls found in Java in 1888 near the village of Wadjak (now spelled Wajak). In every way, they are modern human skulls. But DuBois didn't publish anything about them until 1920 (except in quarterly and annual reports to the director of education, religion, and industry of the Dutch East Indies government). No one even knew he had them until then. The site where they were found was destroyed by quarrying, so there is no way to date them geologically. But most scientists who have studied both sets of fossils (the Java Man skull cap and femur along with the Wajak skulls) believe that they are similar in age. However, the Java Man skull cap looks more Neandertal than anything else, and the Wajak skulls look quite modern, as does the Java Man femur.
Many feel that DuBois' handling of the Wajak skulls was at best highly unprofessional and at worst deliberately dishonest. DuBois always insisted that Java Man was
the Missing Link between ancient proto-man and modern humans. Very few paleoanthropologists today accept that interpretation.
Lara also wrote:
Because it's not just the plants, a point you can argue because not all plants are necessarily included in the group not yet there, it's also about all the animals which are later created as man's help. Later, after man is settled in the garden God planted.
You're not going to like my answer, but I'll give it anyway.
When God created the animals in front of Adam in the Garden of Eden,
He wasn't creating them for the first time. There's nothing to indicate that this was the first and only creation of all the animals. And the Genesis narrative was not written to satisfy any person's desire for scientific accuracy.
Your objection to the story of the flood on the basis of how many of which animals Noah loaded onto the ark is interesting, but only because you're trying to be 21st-century scientifically literal again. In Genesis 6:19-20 it says:
You are also to bring into the ark two of every living thing of all flesh, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of everything — from the birds according to their kinds, from the livestock according to their kinds, and from every animal that crawls on the ground according to its kind — will come to you so that you can keep them alive.
Seems pretty straightforward. But another valid interpretation of this instruction is that Noah is to bring
mating pairs of every animal onto the ark. The restatement of the instruction in Genesis 7:2-3
You are to take with you seven pairs, a male and its female, of all the clean animals, and two of the animals that are not clean, a male and its female, and seven pairs, male and female, of the birds of the sky—in order to keep £offspring alive on the face of the whole earth.
is exactly that: a restatement with more detail. If this were a real theological problem with Genesis, why hasn't it been corrected before now? Or, perhaps, why hasn't the entire narrative been discredited? Despite the insistence of many with whom I've spoken about Christianity, it is not a requirement that Believers check their reasoning abilities at the door and swallow everything they're told without investigating it themselves.
In closing, let me refer you to the book "Bones of Contention" by Professor Marvin Lubenow. the professor had spent (by the publication date of 2004) more than three decades researching fossils and human evolution. It is a scientific assessment of human fossils from a creationist viewpoint.
Due to the potentially volatile nature of this thread, I'm not going to post any more responses here. Should anyone desire to communicate directly with me, I'll be glad to respond, but not here. I just don't have the time, and I don't want to light off any fiery controversies.
