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Physics and Archaeology
Guinnessy writes: "In 1960 Willard Frank Libby won a Nobel Prize for his work on radiocarbon dating, a technique that truly revolutionize archaeology. Now Physics Today magazine has an article describing how new methods are yielding more accurate dates for our prehistoric ancestors, profoundly affecting our understanding of the past. Neat stuff."
While another response to your post asks us to believe that God *wants* us to be confused, by "planting" bones in the earth, I think that is fairly, um, dumb :-) However, there are really two seperate issues.
1) You have so-called "Creationists" who not only don't understand how the world was created, but don't *want* to understand. "That is one of God's Mysterys and not in the realm of man". BS. Pure and utter BS. As has been said before, if God gave us curiosity, then he meant for us to use it. These people won't be swayed by *any* proof you show them.
2) Scientific Creationists, of which I am one, believe that God is bound be the same laws of physics that we are. However, his level of technology is much, much, much, greater than ours. That presents us with the same difficulty of your stereotypical caveman trying to understand how a microwave works. We can say "this happened, and we're trying really hard to understand how, but some of this is just going to be over our heads". That isn't willing ignorance, that's humility. In other words, just because scientists a 1000 years ago didn't understand basic principles of flight, doesn't mean birds were violating the Laws of Nature.
Now, as to the subject at hand, accurate dating of rocks. Very few Scientific Creationists (intelligent ones, that is) claim that God waved his hand and the earth sprang in being. Matter (energy) can neither be created nor destroyed. So, when creating the Earth, God used existing materials. Whether they came from this solar system or outside of it, doesn't really matter. It does mean that the rocks can be older than the Earth is. The common example used is "if you use 100 year old bricks to make a new house, is the house new, or 100 years old?"
Anyways, I gotta go to lunch, but I'll follow up later.
And I can say the world/universe was created the day I was conceived or born.
More importantly, if you want to argue that the world was created with a perfect history, then it is exactly the same thing as if the world developed over time. If the point of what you said is to defend creationism, then don?t limit yourself to just thinking on such a limited scale of fruits and babies. Consider the fact that if you could know the state of every atom, with its rotation, and basically every piece of energy/non-energy then you can predict the future. Given that, if we assume our big bang theory is correct, if some omnipotent force was able create things as it wanted without limitations, then it could have set the ball in motion for the universe and ultimately us (that includes what we are thinking right now), to be exactly like it wanted from the point of initial expansion. In an isolated system, it would be impossible for the future to deviate, what so ever. This includes setting the constants of the universe so that it allows us the ability to investigate the world around us without limits. And since this omnipotent force was able to foresee the future from the point of initial expansion of the universe, then it falls in quite nicely with the thought that this force still interacts with us today, while it may be just an outcome of the initial conditions.
IMHO, this is the best way for a religion to still claim that their god created the world and universe. While we may figure out that the earth is not the center of the universe like originally defended, I seriously doubt science will be able to disprove an event that occurred before the universe was created. But to explain the fact that our thoughts are just a product of the initial conditions of the universe, would annoy people to say the least, if they really understood it of course.
You seem to hold the idea that something could create the earth (and I assume the universe) in detail, in an instant, yet has a linier existence. Why create something to look 25,000 years old when you can just let unfold in front of you exactly as you want it in the same instant.
No one has ever bred a new species artificially--and both plant and animal breeders have been trying for hundreds of years, as have scientists.
I've heard this one before too. And it's wrong. Way wrong. There are several observed instances of speciation (especially in the world of botany). A good easy read to start with can be found at the Talk.origins Speciation Faq if you're interested in the background and some references to real papers on the issue. I'm sorry, but any book published after 1915 or so that claims that scientists and plant breeders have never been able to come up with new species is blatantly ignoring established facts and probably not worth your time.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"