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.
1. The coelacanth: the species that are still living are a different genus than the fossil ones. (Coelacanths are an order.) So it's as though all we had were fossilized moths, and we assumed they were extinct. Then someone caught a butterfly, and we realized that the order Lepidoptera was still around. That doesn't mean that the fossil moth species are necessarily not extinct, or that the fossils could therefore be younger than we thought.
2. Morris's book: I'm not sure how you get from "expressed misgivings with a framework that threw a century’s worth of geology out the window" to "acknowledged that Whitcomb's and Morris' framework fit with the facts and were a scientifically viable alternative to the current majority view." It seems to me that "threw a century’s worth of geology out the window" and "fit with the facts" have almost the opposite meanings.
3. Space dust: the idea that the moon should have a thick layer of dust came from an early guesstimate based on Earthbound measurements. Later measurements actually taken in space showed that that the expected accumulation should be small. Even Answers in Genesis now acknowledges,
During the 1960s and 1970s many creationists adopted the “moon dust” argument based on early calculations by some secular scientists, but more accurate information is now available.