And Hells come back to haunt me

[TudorGothicSerpent]

You're giving advice that you haven't practiced, no where does scripture claim the earth is just 6000 years old.

This is a statement that I'm not really going to touch very much. The easiest reading of the Bible is the one used by Young Earth Creationists, but arguments regarding that are really just arguments against strict literalism. You can easily interpret the days of Genesis as analogical, or metaphorical. Seeing them as time periods rather than days doesn't really solve any problems (since the events are still out of order), but the school of thought that looks at Genesis as a literary framework doesn't have that problem.

I will just say that those interpretations are very debatable, and there's no particular reason to believe that they were the intention of the author. Then again, there's no particular reason to believe that they weren't. It's a literary question.

You have no proof against Joshua, nor can you prove the rest of the OT is myth.

Actually, there is a lot of proof that the story of the Battle of Jericho and the conquest of Canaan could not have happened as it is detailed in the Book of Joshua. Depending on the date assumed for Joshua's conquest, archaeology suggests that Canaan may still have been an Egyptian outpost at the time (if you go with the earlier dates, which are the most likely from a Biblical standpoint). Some of the cities involved were abandoned at any of the theoretical times for the invasion. While some cities appear to have been destroyed in war, they were destroyed at the wrong time, and in times stretching across a pretty significant period.

All available evidence suggests that the earliest Jews lived in the hill country of Canaan at around 1200 B.C.E. Their communities were barely distinguishable from those of the surrounding Canaanites, and the chief evidence of a Jewish settlement is the lack of pig remains. The archaeological record seems strongly to suggest a population who gradually emerged out of a native Canaanite group and then grew to predominance, rather than a foreign invader who supplanted the native population.

Other parts of the Old Testament also present significant problems. For the Exodus to have occurred and for Egypt to have no record of it seems highly unlikely. Beyond that, the 40 years spent wandering the desert would have been expected to leave some evidence, regardless of the accepted size of the Israelite party (by any interpretation, it was large). No archaeological evidence for a group of such a significant size exists in the region. Solomon's reign is also recorded as occurring during a time when the archaeological record indicates that the eastern Mediterranean was abnormally impoverished. Whether Jerusalem was large enough to have actually functioned as a national capital during the time of King David is also very questionable.

The Old Testament from the time of the restoration of Israel by Persia is fairly reliable for historical information (as much as many other ancient sources; very few would meet modern standards of objective, secular record keeping).

There are fossilized trees standing vertically through tens of thousands of years of sedimentary layers, how is that possible, it ain't.

GC

Others have already posted responses to this, so I'll let them take it on. I don't know enough about this particular case to speak knowledgeably about it.