A fun inverse of this exercise is to go to something like Proofs for a young earth and see how many of them you can counter-argue (and consider how convincing your argument will be to someone with a low level of background knowledge).
With that in mind, I’m not really happy with any of the provided proofs for the age of the universe. While there are a bunch of accessible and intuitively-plausible arguments for getting the age of the earth to at least several million years, determining the age of the universe seems to depend on a bunch of complicated estimates and intermediate steps that are easy to get wrong.
I will definitely check out the “proofs for young earth” thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven’t had time to separate in 10K years (haven’t checked this, but surely it’s right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I’m making this up but it fits), maybe they’re a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.
“SA and Africa look like they fit together” is a good example, because at first glance it looks just a dumb coincidence and not any kind of solid evidence. Indeed, it’s partly for that reason that the theory of continental drift was rejected for a long time; you needed a bunch of other lines of evidence to come together before continental drift really looked like a solid theory.
So using the continental drift argument requires you to not just demonstrate that the pieces fit, but include all of the other stuff that holds up the theory and then use that to argue for the age of the earth.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other evidences for the age of the earth or universe that have shorter argument chains. It’s genuinely hard! (And partly for that reason I wouldn’t be too surprised if new evidence caused us to revise our estimates for the age of the universe by a factor of two in either direction.)
A fun inverse of this exercise is to go to something like Proofs for a young earth and see how many of them you can counter-argue (and consider how convincing your argument will be to someone with a low level of background knowledge).
With that in mind, I’m not really happy with any of the provided proofs for the age of the universe. While there are a bunch of accessible and intuitively-plausible arguments for getting the age of the earth to at least several million years, determining the age of the universe seems to depend on a bunch of complicated estimates and intermediate steps that are easy to get wrong.
I will definitely check out the “proofs for young earth” thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven’t had time to separate in 10K years (haven’t checked this, but surely it’s right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I’m making this up but it fits), maybe they’re a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.
“SA and Africa look like they fit together” is a good example, because at first glance it looks just a dumb coincidence and not any kind of solid evidence. Indeed, it’s partly for that reason that the theory of continental drift was rejected for a long time; you needed a bunch of other lines of evidence to come together before continental drift really looked like a solid theory.
So using the continental drift argument requires you to not just demonstrate that the pieces fit, but include all of the other stuff that holds up the theory and then use that to argue for the age of the earth.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any other evidences for the age of the earth or universe that have shorter argument chains. It’s genuinely hard! (And partly for that reason I wouldn’t be too surprised if new evidence caused us to revise our estimates for the age of the universe by a factor of two in either direction.)