We will use the abbreviation "YEC" for Young Earth Creationism

YEC Response: God created the universe with the appearance of age even though it is actually not that old.

Counter: It sounds like you are saying God is trying to trick us. You would never say that unless you already were committed to the earth being young, so the real issue is what the Bible actually says. The universe looks old because it is old. Unless we have a good reason to think otherwise, go with what we see.

YEC Response: The distance to these starts is supposedly many trillions of miles away. That is calculated by measuring their movement on the sky, calculating the angle and using trigonometry. But that angle is tiny at that distance. You can't be confident about that measurement

We can be confident because we have very accurate equipment. But even if we coudln't be confident, we would still know the YEC view is wrong. On the YEC view, all distant galaxies and stars cannot be more than 6000 light years away. At that range, they would have to have massive effects on each other. But they are clearly distant from each other, which is only possible if they are very far away.

YEC Response: Radiometric dating is untrustworthy because nobody has been watching how fast it really goes for millions of years, it could speed up or slow down.

Counter: Other dating methods are used to confirm the reliability of radiometric dating.

YEC Response: That is circular reasoning. You are using one unproven thing to justify another unproven thing.

Counter: It is not circular reasoning. Ice piles up on Greenland and Antarctica and we can see each layer is a winter. We count the layers and count the years. We date the rocks at the bottom with radiometric dating. If we get a date that agrees from both methods, the odds of such different methods agreeing by accident is fantastically improbable.

Counter: Carbon 14 decays fast enough that it cannot be used to date anything more than 50,000 years ago. If it is longer than that, and the amount of C14 is very tiny. At that low amount, radiation from the sun can actually send particles back in and change the amounts. Other types of radiometric dating have to be used for dates older than 50K years ago.

Counter: They gain new ice in the unobservable Oort cloud at the far reaches of our solar system.

YEC Response: The Oort Cloud is unobservable and therefore cannot be used to prove anything.

Counter: We have other evidence for it. We see numerous new comets every year. Based on these comets' trajectories, they will take millions of years to orbit the sun. For there to be so many of these new ones each year, there has to be a massive number of them in the far reaches of the solar system, which is what the Oort Cloud is.

Counter: Based on our best measurements, this would have been around 1 to 2 billion years ago, not a million years ago. But it is how the moon interacts with the oceans and the tides this creates that matters. It is this interaction that creates this effect of moving the moon away. The estimate for the age of the earth is just over 4 billion years. If the specific arrangement of earth's oceans has changed in the past, then it would actually do way with this effect on the moon. We have good evidence that our current effect of moving the moon out is abnormally high. The effect is at a special resonant point with our current arrangement of oceans that is just right for moving the moon out. Given that the current rate of moon movement is abnormally high, then a best estimate is that even at the origin of the earth moon system, the moon was plenty far away. We can clearly observe that the continents are slowly moving. Therefore, if we can go far back into the past, the arrangment of oceans and continents had to be different from today.

YEC Response: It may be that the dates for the flood are slightly off and the flood happened just before the Pyramid was built.

Counter: That does not fix anything at all. The great pyramid was the climax of a long period of pyramid construction. And then there is all that was built before the period of Pyramid construction. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, we see continual human habitation, building, farming, and other evidence of population between 3000 and 2000BC. There is no sudden extermination of all the people and animals. Furthermore, if there was, then why would the new people return and quickly just pick up where things left off? There is no change of culture, writing, building styles, art styles or any noticeable shift in cultural change in this period of the magnitude you need. People would have to have returned and started back making bricks in the same unique way, worhsipping the same deities, using the same writing methods unique to that period and not later ones, making the same style of tombs and pottery. The list goes on and on.

YEC Response: Noah only took babies and eggs on the ark, including dinosaur eggs. And there were not examples of all species. For example, Noah only had one dog kind. It then evolved into dogs, jackals, the various foxes, coyotes, hyenas, and the various wolves. There were about 2000 animals on the ark.

Counter: I thought you guys were against evolution. Are you saying that most of the species that have ever lived on earth arose through evolution? Are you saying that species evolved into other species? What exactly did something as unique as kangaroos evolve from? Was it a horse or a dog? And how did they cross the 120 mile stretches of ocean to get to Australia? We are talking about millions and millions of distinct species. How long did it take to repopulate the animal kingdom?

YEC Response: Based on our models, evolution would have been a matter of decades. And they floated on logs to cross the ocean.

Counter: You are a stronger believer in evolution than Charles Darwin could have ever dreamed. You have given up the right to object to evolution. Also, what did the animals eat and drink as they made these incredible ocean voyages? There are lizards that are native to Easter Island, which is over 2000 miles away from the nearest land. And you say they rode on slow moving logs, eating and drinking nothing.

Counter: It teaches a local flood. The Hebrew word “erets” is translated as “earth” in Genesis 6,7,8 (the flood account). It is translated as “earth” over 700 times in the Bible. It is translated as “land” over 1400 times in the Bible. So it is perfectly legitimate to translate it as “land.” Copy and past the flood account into a text editor. Swap “land” for “earth” and you will see that this is the real reason you read it as a global flood.

YEC Response: The text says that the “kol erets” or “whole earth” was flooded. So that is all of the land.

Counter: It is not actually. The text says that the waters receded and the tops of mountains were visible. But later a bird returned to the ark because the “whole land” was underwater. So it did not mean literally all land. It meant all of the region or all of the land where they lived. Furthermore, there is Psalm 104. It recounts creation. At the beginning the earth was covered with water. Then dry land appears. But in Psalm 104, it explicitly says that the land was never again covered with water.

YEC Response: The Psalms are metaphorical and poetic language and do not tell us anything about Genesis.

Counter: It is very difficult to see what Psalm 104 means other than what I have suggested. Why are you willing to see prophetic information about Jesus in the Psalms but cannot see commentary on creation in the Psalms?

Counter: The Hebrew word “Yom” can also mean an unspecified period of time. So it could be 6 creation time periods of unspecified length.

YEC Response: Yom only means that in a metaphorical or figurative meaning. It is like saying “back in the day." It is only used that way poetically in the Bible.

Counter: No, that is objectively false. Yom had multiple literal meanings. Modern English has roughly 2 million words. About half of those are biology terms. Ancient Hebrew had about 6000 words. So words had to have multiple meanings. Genesis 2:4 refers to the 6 Yoms of creation as one Yom. That is clearly a literal usage of the word, in the context of Genesis 1-2. And there it has to mean an unspecified time period.

YEC Response: There were other words in Hebrew that meant an unspecified time period. Moses chose Yom because it is the only word for a 24 hour day.

Counter: That is objectively false. Modern Hebrew has other words. Hebrew of the Babylonian exile has other words. But the Hebrew of the days of Moses only had one word for an unspecified time period. Moses chose the only word in his language for that. And he even used it that way in Genesis 2:4.

YEC Response: You use context clues in an ancient language like that to figure out which meaning you go by. Each creation day ends with the phrase, “and there was evening and there was morning.” This makes it very clear that these are normal 24 hour days.

Counter: Augustine noticed this issue back in 400 AD. And he was not influenced by modern science back then. The sun and moon are created on day 4. So what sort of morning and evening does one have on days 1 through 3? Those cannot possibly be normal mornings and evenings without a sun and moon. Furthermore, Genesis 1:14 explicitly states they are created to mark the passage of time. Specifically they are marking sacred times, days and years. So it appears that times, days and years were not marked out with signs before that.

YEC Response: God created another light source much like the sun on day one. Then he removed it and replaced it with the sun.

Counter: That is a very liberal interpretation. You are creating things the text does not say and forcing them into the text to make your interpretation work. But you do not have to do that if you simply say that these are not normal days. In fact, the text seems to be going out of its way to make these abnormal days. By including the morning and evening phrase and then adding the sun and moon later, it seems the purpose of this phrase is to make it clear that these are not normal days. Even with your invented temporary sun, these are not normal days. If they are not normal days, then the text is not being clear on exactly what sort of days they are.

YEC Response: The Law of Moses commands a 6 day work week because it correlates with the week of creation.

Counter: This obviously is not a literal one to one correspondence. The Israelites did not create the universe over and over again every week. Furthermore, once God finished his work, He was done. On day 7, God rested from creating. God's week does not restart, but the Hebrew week does. Furthermore, God is still resting from creation. He has not returned to creating the world again. Therefore, God's day of rest is still going. It does not have the “morning and evening” phrase that signals the end of a creation day. It is clearly a long period of time. And if day 7 is a long period of time, why cannot the other ones be? Moses already made it abundantly clear that they are not normal days.

YEC Response: God is still resting from creation. But day 7 was a 24 hour period of rest.

Counter: That makes no sense at all. The rest is still going and day 7 is the day of rest. I think you may really be getting thrown off because there is no word in english that has the double meanings of 24 hours and unspecified time period the way Yom does. Furthermore, the text says that God blessed day 7 and made it holy because He rested from creation on it. God is still resting. So is only the first day of his rest holy? Or are all the days of His rest holy? Furthermore, Hebrews 4 tells us that God is still in his Sabbath rest and that we can one day enter it. It should also be noted that Psalm 90, by Moses, says that to God, a thousand years are like a day, or even just a portion of the night. It seems clear that Moses is telling us how to interpret Genesis 1 and the creation days. They are unspecified time periods. They are not even thousand year periods because they are likened to a portion of the night as well as a day. They are unspecified time periods according to Moses.

YEC Response: If the world is millions of years old, then there was much animal death before humans were created. But the Bible teaches in Romans 5 that death entered the world through Adam, so no animals died before Adam died.

Counter: Romans 5 goes on to make itself very clear on this point. It says that this is why humans die. And on that point, Adam and Eve are supposedly going to die on the day that they eat from the tree. But the text says that they clearly live hundreds of years longer. This is no problem at all if the word Yom means a long age.