In case you forgot, science is cool!

As far as religious assaults on reality go, I'm mostly familiar with the crazy worlds of bible apologetics and intelligent design. For a change of pace I thought I'd look into some of the arguments that are used by proponents of the young earth (10,000 or less years old). As always, taken in isolation the arguments are pretty compelling. For instance, if comets can only last on the order of 10s of thousands of years due to evaporation, a fact that no astrophysicist disputes, how can there be comets around still? Or if we know that meteor dust falls on the earth and moon at a certain rate then why is there only a couple of centimeters of dust on the moon as the 10,000 year old earth theory would predict (and not dozens of feet)?

I had actually never heard the young earth arguments before and did not have any ready responses to most of the young earth claims. As usual the real scientific story behind these mysteries is way more interesting than certain leather bound fairy tales. If you've never looked at the young earth claims and their debunking here is a great introduction:

How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?