Does anyone even listen to creationists these days?

[Sigurd]

We are discussing a young earth... but let the big elephant in the room go unnoticed. Not only does the Creationists claim the earth is young, but the whole universe is treated in the creation story in Genesis.
If God created all the stars and the unnumbered systems out there at the same time as the earh, explain Andromeda.

[Rhyfelwyr]

A lot can happen in a thousand years, it's not simultaneous.
And not all human history is traced back to that time, some of it is traced back to quite a while before that, but if you claim that the tracing is all lies and mistakes then how do I know that your number of 7k years ago isn't all lies and mistakes either?

Anything before that is prehistory and is basically nothing but pure guesswork. All we have to understand it is relative (not absolute) dating systems from which we can produce theories.

As for a lot happening in a thousand years, I don't believe the evolutionary model allows for contact between Mesopotamia, China, Papua New Guinea, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and all the other places that independently developed agriculture within that 1,000 year timeframe. If you can't explain it by human contact and the spread of ideas/technology, then how do you explain it?

We are discussing a young earth... but let the big elephant in the room go unnoticed. Not only does the Creationists claim the earth is young, but the whole universe is treated in the creation story in Genesis.
If God created all the stars and the unnumbered systems out there at the same time as the earh, explain Andromeda.

I'm only going to fight one battle at a time, but I'm guessing your question has something to do with the fact that conditions in the very early universe were totally different from what they are now (as in, basic fundamental laws etc).

[Sigurd]

I'm only going to fight one battle at a time, but I'm guessing your question has something to do with the fact that conditions in the very early universe were totally different from what they are now (as in, basic fundamental laws etc).

That's fine. Anyone could answer this. No, I am thinking about the timescale here. 6 days - 6000 years old earth. How is Andromeda visible on our night sky?

[Montmorency]

Are you telling me that these extremely different environments all suddenly (the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms) created the same population pressures that forced/pushed the development of agriculture, permanent settlement and civilization across the world?

Er, well, ice ages tend to be global phenomena, so, yes. No indication of "forced", by the way - just enabled.

But then again they are dated with the same methods that confuse recent murder victims with ancient skeletons. As I said earlier radiocarbon dating and other methods from that group rely on relative rather than absolute dating - much of it lies in the interpretation and that's why I'm disagreeing with.

Laughably false in every respect.

how you reconcile the sudden advent of civilization across the world with the slow, gradual, hundreds-of-thousands-of-years evolutionary approach.

Not only are you misapplying a principle, but you are misunderstanding the basic nature of gradualist/Darwinian evolutionary theory. "Gradual" just means as opposed to saltational or punctuated. The movement of a car across a highway is gradual, yet its speed may range from 0 to 100 k/h at any given time or in any given interval.

[Gilrandir]

Regarding dinosaurs, I would question the dating. I don't doubt they existed.

Why do you put dinosaurs in plural? In fact, there was only one dinosaur species, only paleontologists assemble the bones differently every time they find some.

Also, long-distance migrations were still the norm ten thousand of years ago, all the way up to the Medieval period.

And much later - think of Israel after WWII.

If God created all the stars and the unnumbered systems out there at the same time as the earh, explain Andromeda.

Once upon a time there lived a Greek guy named Perseus...

My view of what happened is that a people with extensive knowledge of agriculture, seafaring, urban development etc first settled in the Middle East and then settled the world over a period of about 1,000 years.

It doesn't account for great cultural and technological differences between the civilizations you mentioned. Like the American ones never knew the wheel.

[Montmorency]

And much later - think of Israel after WWII.

If you want to go that route now, think of regional and international movement and migration of labor today: hundreds of millions in China alone, to say nothing of Eastern Europe-Central Asia, Latin America to North America, internally in the United States, Western Europe as we all know...

However, crucially, by this time the migration of massive and cohesive social units (e.g. "tribes") is over.

With rather few exceptions, whole nations are not v'pokhode gatoviye.

That said, out of interest what are the major exceptions from the past century? That is, general immigration patterns or sporadic refugee movements aren't really counted here.

1. Israel
2. South Vietnam-United States
3. Soviet Jewry-United States/Israel
4. Ethnic cleansing of Prussia

...

[Gilrandir]

With rather few exceptions, whole nations are not v'pokhode gatoviye.

Sorry couldn't help this one: v pokhod gotovyie.
But I'm sure even in ancient times it was not the WHOLE nations that were on the move. There were some individuals (or perhaps even groups) that chose to stay (see Avari "The Silmarillion") or turned back at an early stage.

[Montmorency]

But I'm sure even in ancient times it was not the WHOLE nations that were on the move. There were some individuals (or perhaps even groups) that chose to stay (see Avari "The Silmarillion") or turned back at an early stage.

Look, you got me - there's a whole can of worms on cultural identity and group membership that I wanted to avoid opening up, so I used a 'quick and easy' shorthand.

A more precise and sociologically-neutral way to put it would be:

Whole communities, or large parts of them, no longer travel cohesively (i.e. constituting a sociopolitical unit) from an origination point to settle, permanently or otherwise, at some other point. A community here can be supralocal, e.g. in the sense of the Nordic settlers of Iceland.

Actually, from that point of view Israel/Soviet Jewry is an interesting case, since with Israel you had many local communities loosely-connected by shared traditions and a nascent Zionism converging on one point in order to undertake a project of forming a new "nation". Of course, if you're a hard-core Zionist that analysis would be tendentious, but really a broader Jewish identity existed only in a relatively-limited number of intellectuals and political activists, even as recently as a century ago. Similar with the Vietnamese case.