The Great Plains were a shallow sea about 77,000,000 years ago, if I read this right: http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Publications/ancient/rep02.html (And I'm sure someones will tell me if I'm reading it wrong. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! )
It would obviously be a wild stretch for any group to buy into other than fundamentalists, hybrid New Age cults, etc... But your son might go that "grand illusion or deception" route of Philip K Dick's. Where the original Biblical version of the world, as well as the continued reign of the Roman Empire, are concealed behind the mediated reality of whatever adversarial occult agent maintains such. This would yield a dual-epistemological solution of "science studies how the virtual deception version of the world works" so as to manipulate / control the mass hallucination according to its own rules. Whereas creationists are still free to consult the history of Genesis and the OT for what the "real world is" behind the facade (from their perspective, beliefs). Evolution and the age of rocks would fit into the "false history" of how things came to be, but an internal story which nevertheless must be learned and obliged in order to get things successfully done in biological, geological, etc pursuits. Again, given the nature of what certain groups entertain to begin with, even I'm not sure that I'm being facetious here in terms of them or a particular student accepting such a remedy of "Can't we all just get along?". ~
Oops about the date---make that 358-400 Yes as to devonian. In some places we can see silurian rocks underlying the devonian and, of course piles of glacial erratics. see map above
Referring to the opening post... If I was the science teacher, I would emphasise that conclusions about the age of the Earth are based on a convergence of many different types of evidence. Every time the topic came up, in whatever context, I would be saying "And here's another thing that tells us the Earth is 4.5 billion years old..." or whatever. If the student doesn't have a problem with plate tectonics, then it can be pointed out that immense amounts of time are needed for continental drift - at least hundreds of millions of years. That fact alone is completely incompatible with Earth being 6000 years old. And the evidence that, for example, Africa used to be joined to South America, is quite extensive (and not just one kind of evidence, once again). There's no need to shove stuff in the student's face. The science teacher should just present the facts in context. If enough evidence is presented, and the student is not closed to learning for other reasons, then he will eventually put the pieces together himself and come to the only logical conclusion.
Just use the phrase, "appears to be millions of years old". If the student asks why the rocks appear to be that old, then give whatever the accepted scientific answer is. Just teach what the conventional scientific view is. Don't pound on the table with a fist insisting it's the final ultimate revealed truth. Let the student decide for himself how much of the scientific picture he wants to accept and how he wants to deal with the inevitable contradictions with what he's taught elsewhere. Just make it sound as reasonable as possible. Even if a student doesn't want to accept that the Earth is more than 4,000 years old, at least try to ensure that he will have a decent grounding in what conventional science says about the matter and some knowledge of why it says it.
did you try telling her that if it can be proven to be older than 10,000 years it is worth at least $50,000.00 USD ? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! might be an interesting experiment in religious anthropology
