List of arguments for a young Earth

This page lists arguments made by young earth creationists that the Earth must be younger than the 4.54 billion year age usually ascribed to it by the mainstream scientific community.
*The shrinking sun argument: This argument contends that, since the Sun is shrinking at a rate of 5 feet/hour, assuming it has always been shrinking at that rate, the Earth-sun relationship cannot be more than 5 million years old. The argument is based on a study presented at a conference in 1979 by John Eddy and Aram Boornazian, from which the figure of 5 feet per hour is derived. (Some creationists describe the figure as "almost 6 feet per hour".) In the paper, Eddy and Boornazian examined a 117-year time period (from 1836 to 1953) using data from the Royal Greenwich Observatory. However, it has been pointed out that it is unwarranted to extrapolate a rate measured over such a short period of time, with Howard J. Van Till writing that "Relatively slow change, either contraction or expansion, extending over a period of hundreds or even thousands of years could also be the consequence of oscillatory or temporary changes in the behavior of the solar interior. But a truly secular shrinkage, that is, a steady decrease in size over an indefinitely long period of time, would be at odds with contemporary models of solar behavior and inconsistent with geological evidence." In addition, Dave Matson has pointed out that "serious flaws in methodology turned up and the data has since been discredited; the full text of their study was never published."
*The moon dust argument (also known as the cosmic dust) argument: This figure was an estimate, and was later superseded by actual measurements made by satellite-mounted detectors; for example an article published in New Scientist in 1976 concluded that every year 200 million tons of dust enters our solar system.
*The short-period comets argument: other creationists have argued that the existence of short-period comets proves that the universe is young, because such comets disintegrate over time as they orbit the Sun. Thus, the argument states that, given that comets lose some of their material every time they orbit the sun and should last about 400 orbits, that all comets should have evaporated within 10,000 years of the beginning of the universe. However, this argument ignores the abundant evidence for the existence of sources to supply additional comets, namely the Oort Cloud and Kuiper belt.
*The magnetic field argument: this argument asserts that the Earth's magnetic field is decaying, meaning it would have been so strong more than 10,000 years ago that it would have melted the earth. This argument originated with creationist Thomas G. Barnes, who proposed it in 1971. His argument has since been refuted, as it is based on an obsolete model of the earth's magnetic field rather than the dynamo model that has long been accepted by the scientific community.
*Creationists' arguments that not enough salts are dissolved in the oceans to account for billions of years of influxes ignore that these salts are being removed from the oceans at about the same rate as they flow in, meaning that the oceans are nearly in chemical equilibrium.

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