And again I have to point to the false dichotomy you pose between the catastrophic theories of creationists and the ‘unlikely’ gradualism of contemporary geologists. Creationist catastrophism has been a dead donkey for much more than a century. The current understanding incorporates short-term catastrophic events into a much broader picture of the gradual processes that shape the Earth’s surface. That you seem unaware of this only supports your admission that you are ‘no earth scientist.’

It is also the case that the dating of the possible ‘resurfacing’ event on Venus has nothing to do with the evidence (or lack thereof) of a similar event having taken place on Earth less than 5,000 years ago, nor has it anything to say in regard to the obviously disastrous short- and long-term consequences for the biosphere (and everything in it) of such a cataclysmic event. What, for example, would be the effects on the world’s oceans of a global flood of basaltic lava? What would be the effects on the world’s climate of this flood?

If you doubt that these would be drastic, you need do no more than look up the estimated global effects of the volcanic eruptions that are evidenced by the Deccan Traps and that ‘resurfaced’ an area of the globe equal to less one-half that of the Indian subcontinent (that is, about 1.5 million square kilometres as against the total surface area of Earth of around 510 million square kilometres, or less than one-third of one percent of what you are proposing).

Again I suggest that any life above the level of bacteria would have been wiped out, Earth’s climate would still be showing the consequences and there would be a clear and unmistakable ‘footprint’ in a range of phenomena that can be reliably dated back over the few thousands of years needed to make your theory plausible. Indeed, you and I would not be here debating the issue.

It seems to me that the weight of evidence that supports the general conclusion to be drawn from the various different methods of radiometric dating – that the age of Earth and the Solar System is to be measured in billions of years – is convincing.

For the contrary to be true, that the Universe is less than 10,000 years old, would mean that all of those many different radiometric methods would each have to be not only wrong, but wrong in pretty much the same way. Which may be an arguable point, but you then have to deal with the several dating methodologies that have nothing whatsoever to do with radiometric dating directly – ice cores, coral growth, lake varves and dendrochronology, to name but a few – that all return results that are consistent with radiometric estimates for the timescales to which they are relevant.

There are then the various methods that have been used to calculate the age of the Universe as such; a number of these methods have not relied on radiometric methods – such as the Hubble constant (10-16 billion years) and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (13.7 billion years), for example – but again they all return ages calculated to be in the billions of years and are in the same ballpark as figures returned by measuring the decay of radioactive elements (12-15 billion years).

Finally, it is the case that radiometric dating is known to be accurate within a relatively small margin of error for historical artefacts of an already known provenance. To cast doubt on radiometric dating techniques as a whole, therefore, you need not just to postulate that they may be in error by the multiple orders of magnitude you require to support YE creationism, but you need also to provide evidence for why those magnitudes of error returned by the different radiometric dating techniques are consistent with each other AND with the different dating techniques that don’t depend on radiometric dating at all AND with dates that can be tied to known historical events or artefacts.

You will have to forgive me if it seems to be the case that your arguments are conclusion-driven – that is, led by the need to ‘prove’ YE creationism – rather than by observation – that is, to follow where the evidence reasonably leads.

For my part, I found this resource particularly useful and other readers may like to refer to it as well, ‘A Radiometric Dating Resource List’ available here:

http://www.tim-thompson.com/radiometric.html