As a teenager in the 1970's I read all the SDA material on Creation Science, and other seminal books as well. I believed I was being told the truth by these authors - that the long-age arguments were flawed. But then I attended a Creation Science seminar my second year at university - and saw first-hand that the credibility was lacking. So I started reading more deeply into the long-age evidence. After ten years I finally changed my mind - decided the evidence in favor of long-ages was so overwhelming that I would change from a short-age minimal-changes viewpoint to a long-age many-changes viewpoint.

Here is a list of a few of the items that caused me to make that change.

Geology

- Continental drift: Barely accepted science in the early 1970's, solidly supported by measurements, by fossils, by rock formations, by the distribution of species in the 1980's. It is truely difficult to explain New Zealand in a short-age model - and easy in the long-age model.

- Paleomagnetism: The magnetic fields measured in the rocks of the mid-Atlantic rift clearly speak of long ages

- Meteors and glaciers: The distribution of meteors in the Antarctic ice clearly show huge periods of time as the meteors fall, are carried by the glaciers, and deposited where the glaciers end.

- Limestone: The White Cliffs of Dover are obviously made from shells, and it takes a long time to produce that many

- Coal: There is a LOT of it

- Cold mountains: Bent strata requires huge amounts of heat and pressure, and it takes a LONG time for the mountains to cool down afterwards

- Huge Meteor impact craters - severely eroded

- World-wide iridium dust


Biology

- The fossil record

- The similarities and differences between modern species

- Ice cores clearly showing 100's of thousands of years


Archeology

- We know so much about history back to 2000 BC that there simply is not enough time for Noah's flood to have wiped the Earth clean, and then get the ancient civilizations that we find solid evidence of


I never heard a short-age creationist produce a plausible explanation for any of the above items, or for many more.


/Bevin

Here are some tidbits from an interesting email discussion today:

ME:
The problem in general is this: most people don't know much about the sciences involved, or have only a rudimentary (and frequently secondhand) acquaintance with it all. Therefore they lack the knowledge needed to objectively assess the information they are presented with. As it dovetails with their faith and what they want to be assured of, they are likely to accept it without analysis.

As for the division of the species, many [creationists] have no trouble buying THAT kind of evolution. They just have a problem with evolution as the process of origination of life on this planet and a BIG problem with the millions of years involved.

What is the time table anyway for evolution of life? Is it millions of years or billions? Somehow the number 20 million stands out in my mind but I am not sure if that's current thought or not ...

Another question: creation 'scientists' frequently refer to the lack of intermediary species (and/or fossils thereof) as evidence against evolution. Just wondering, how does evolutionary theory explain that lack?

HK:
Current estimate is that life formed anywhere from 1 billion (pretty
definite evidence) to 2 billion (new evidence emerging) years ago.
Vertebrate life is, of course, much more recent comparatively, but still
hundreds of millions of years old.

As for the fossil gaps, those are slowly being closed by new discoveries.
Other gaps may be genuine ones, which are usually explained via the
"cataclysmic" or "punctuated" evolutionary theory. This states that
relatively short periods of rapid change occur at times of cataclysm or
other environmental stresses, leading to dramatic changes in organism. But
the general slow, steady evolutionary state model holds for most cases of
species development.

WM:
(Re: What is the time table anyway for evolution of life?)
Approximately 3.5 billion years. The dinosaurs were eliminated 65 billion years ago.

(Re: Just wondering, how does evolutionary theory explain that lack?)
They don't, at least in the way that creationists want it explained. One current idea, which has some support in the fossil evidence and from modeling studies, is that of punctured equilibrium, proposed by the late Stephen J. Gould of Harvard. This idea proposes that evolution doesn't necessarily occur in a nice continuous pattern as Darwin's theory suggests, but that populations of a species become stable (equilibrium) over a substantial period of time, and occasionally there are rapid (say, over about 300,00 years) bursts of adaptation (due to perhaps changes in the environment) that become evolutionary forces. Thus, there would be no intermediate species. Also keep in mind that finding fossils at all is a crap game, depending often on fortuitous exposures of surrounding rock. Since we don't know where all these animals lived, we can't say whether any collections of fossils are indicative of actual distributions. Because certain present day animals with great similarities appear on widely separated continents, we can be sure that they either evolved there or else the land masses were much closer several million years ago. Getting monkeys (lots of different kinds) to South America in the few years after the Flood is a not very tenable hypothesis.