RE: BILL NYE VS KEN HAM: TONIGHT AT 7 PM
February 6, 2014 at 9:20 pm
(This post was last modified: February 6, 2014 at 9:21 pm by Whateverist.)
Statler Waldorf Wrote:How do you know what we observe today is what happened in the past? That was Ham’s entire point, you cannot know that, therefore you cannot know how old the Earth is.
Well fine then I concede that knowledge about how old the earth is in any precise sense is a fool's enterprise. So on some nit picky level we can agree to remain agnostic about the precise age of the earth.
But how far do you wish to take it? Would you in the same way insist the earth might be less than 25 minutes old since an all-powerful genie could make anything happen?
The available evidence for the age of the earth is more than sufficient to rule out an age of 25 minutes - with whatever caveat you find necessary to cover mischievous genies or brains in vats. The evidence is equally compelling to rule out an age of 6000 years. Silly stuff aside, extrapolating what what we observe going forward to what has preceded the observable we can be quite sure the earth is billions of years old.
