You make a good point that a claim to creationist belief might be in terms of a belief that God set in motion the Big Bang. Noting of course that belief in the

You make a good point that a claim to creationist belief might be in terms of a belief that God set in motion the Big Bang. Noting of course that belief in the Truth of the Big Bang is as scientific as a belief in the Truth of the existence of God. Neither claim has been verified, both have arguments for and against, both have reasonable alternative theories. > In the case of believing that the Earth is <10kyr old, however, the conflict is clear. I have found that in the "scientific creationist" camp (scientific because they propose experiments to test hypotheses and write up their results in a paper format so that the experiment is understood and replicable) there is a lot of useful discussion about assumptions regarding dating. Not talking about the blind faith camp, talking about people asking how remnants of helium isotopes can be found in ancient rocks when the expected diffusion rates of the helium give a substantially different date than measuring remnant radioactive isotope content. These are interesting findings. They may not prove anything about God, but they are at least exploring interesting scientific issues. For example, most of them will be OK with saying the earth is about 4.5 billion years old as long as we acknowledge that by "years" we mean not in terms of orbits of the earth around the sun, but in terms of the time for radioactive decay to occur, assuming a given set of original conditions which may or may not be correct.