Thank you for reading the link. I think you’re reading a lot into Dr. Berger’s motivations. For one, since he describes himself as a conservative Christian who had reservations about letting his letter be published on that blog, I’m surprised you think he would dismiss an underlying enmity against God if he thought it existed or was an important factor in the promotion of the ToE.
And I watched some of your link—enough to get to his explanation of the radiometric testing process, at least. (I don’t have an hour to give to it.) I only saw him discuss one example of multiple tests—Leakey skull 1470—but he impies, falsely I think, that the singular result he mentions was the one they were looking for. (All the book says is that they never got that particular result again, not that it was the one they hoped for.) He also cites the range of results in a way that the results were scattered throughout the range, while it’s also possible that they coalesced around a central value in a bell curve. I, frankly, just don’t know. From what I read, it does appear that the rocks around that skull (and they were dating the rocks, not the skull itself) presented a particularly challenging task, especially 40 years ago when it was found. I’d like to hear an actual scientist explain why the results were all over the map and how they arrived at the one they finally settled on. I don’t trust Dr. Patton to give a fair presentation.
Dr. Patton would assuredly, by his own admission, not give the topic a fair treatment. I humbly submit that few, if any, could. The bell curve/coalescing of data is a fair question as well - what, indeed, is the distribution? And what would the standard deviation of many such distributions against different samples from different sites look like? With billions of molecules in a typical sample (of which only a tiny fraction would be tested), it's difficult to say - and now I'm curious as well as to a typical distribution shape.
There are a myriad of facts supporting the young earth position. One is the geological column, specifically the coelacanth: thought to be extinct for 66 million years but caught 1938 (and over 600 caught since then). Despite the fact they are alive today, they are still regarded as marker fossils: If you find a coelacanth, you "know" the rock is 66 million years old. The same could be said of the Wollemi pine, a marker designating an "age" of 150 million years, found alive and well outside Sydney, Australia. To my mind at least, it's a non sequitur that we would continue to use these for dating when their extinction has been refuted.
Maybe, just maybe, the depth in the rock has more to do with suspension properties in a slurry of mud than with age...
In 1961 John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris penned a book entitled The Genesis Flood. In the book's forward, John C. McCampbell, an evolutionary geologist, acknowledged that Whitcomb's and Morris' framework fit with the facts and were a scientifically viable alternative to the current majority view.
Morris replaced uniformitarianism with what he called “Biblical catastrophism,” a framework that resulted in the wholesale rejection of everything geologists thought they knew about geology. Even the author of the book’s forward, John C. McCampbell, a geology professor from the University of Southwestern Louisiana (and presumably one of the most sympathetic geology professors that could be found anywhere), expressed misgivings with a framework that threw a century’s worth of geology out the window. “I would prefer to hope that some other means of harmonization of religion and geology, which retains the structure of modern historical geology, could be found,” he wrote. (GF, xvii) Trying hard to muster a compliment, Professor McCampbell credits Morris with “real independent thinking,” which he described as fast “becoming a lost art.” (GF, xviii)
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Nicholas Steno, the father of stratigraphy, whose principles still form the basis of geology 450 years hence, attributed the fossils to the great Noachian deluge. I believe he even dedicated one of his works to the same (in the original at a museum in London).
There's the salinity of the dead sea, the depth of the oceans in consideration of annual erosion, the tiny amount of dust on the surface of the moon, the magentic fields strength of the earth (and of Mercury - did you know Mercury has a magnetic field but shouldn't being too small for a central dynamo - the only thing that can sustain magnetism for the timeframes in question? And Venus should have one but doesn't?)
The evidence for a young earth is quite abundant, and an alternative explanation for the geologic column readily available...
The point I wish to make is that observational science does not require either the long ages or the evolution of life from abiotic origins to press forward. A fair case could be made, in fact, that science, based on observable, measurable, and repeatable phenomena has been both distracted and hampered by the same where intelligent and competent men and women might have focused their energies elsewhere.
Noah's Ark is the next big find, in my opinion... I do not expect even that, though, would change minds because questions of origins ultimately come down less to facts than to emotion. Such has been my experience, anyway.