Arguments Worth Retiring

If you grew up in church, or watched a creation video, you were probably handed a few of these as knock-down proofs: there is too little dust on the moon for it to be old; the sun is shrinking; human footprints lie beside dinosaur tracks in Texas; NASA's computers found Joshua's missing day. They are repeated with great confidence, often from a pulpit. And here is the uncomfortable thing a truthful page has to say: most of them do not hold up, and in several cases the creation scientists themselves have publicly asked people to stop using them. This page goes through the main ones honestly — what the claim is, why it was appealing, and where the evidence has actually landed — because a faith that loves the truth should be the first, not the last, to drop a bad argument.

Part 1 · Once-taught arguments the evidence has passed by

The moon dust

The claim: meteoric dust falls onto the moon at a steady rate; if the moon were billions of years old there would be a deep dust layer, so NASA feared the Apollo landers would sink — and instead the dust was shallow, proving a young moon. Where it stands: the argument rested on a 1950s over-estimate of how fast space dust accumulates. Later satellite measurements showed the real influx is far smaller, and a shallow dust layer is exactly what an old moon should have. Answers in Genesis itself published "the moon-dust argument is no longer useful" after its own geologist (Andrew Snelling) re-examined the numbers. Retired by the creationists who once used it.

The shrinking sun

The claim: a 1979 study suggested the sun's diameter was slowly shrinking; extrapolated backward, the sun would have been impossibly large in the recent past, so it cannot be billions of years old. Where it stands: the apparent shrinkage came from a short run of historical measurements and turned out to be, at most, part of a small back-and-forth oscillation, not a steady trend — later data showed no long-term shrinking. The extrapolation was never valid. This one, too, is on the creationist "do not use" lists.

The Paluxy "man tracks"

The claim: in the bed of the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas, human-looking footprints appear alongside dinosaur tracks — men and dinosaurs together, overturning the whole timeline. It was the centerpiece of a widely-shown 1970s creationist film. Where it stands: on closer study the "human" prints proved to be eroded or infilled dinosaur tracks, erosional features, and in some cases carvings. Tellingly, the Institute for Creation Research and the filmmakers withdrew the film in the 1980s and cautioned against using the tracks. When the people who made the argument pull it themselves, that is the strongest possible signal to let it go.

The decaying speed of light (c-decay)

The claim: if the speed of light was once far faster and has decayed, then distant starlight could have crossed the cosmos quickly, solving the distant-starlight problem for a young universe. Where it stands: the proposed decay was drawn from scattered historical measurements of differing precision, and it does not survive the data — if the speed of light had changed that much, other physics tied to it would have changed in ways we do not observe. Creationist astronomers themselves now place c-decay on the do-not-use list and pursue other approaches instead (see the starlight page).

The vapor canopy

The claim: a layer of water vapor once encircled the earth, made a greenhouse paradise, and collapsed to cause the Flood's rain. Where it stands: the creation scientists dropped it on a physics problem — the trapped heat would have cooked the planet — with Answers in Genesis urging the movement to "ring the death bell of the canopy and move on." It has its own fuller treatment here; it belongs on this list too.

The salty sea — the honest exception

The claim: rivers carry salt into the ocean faster than it is removed; at today's rates the sea would reach its current saltiness in far less time than the supposed billions of years, so the ocean is young. Where it stands: this one is more interesting, because, unlike the others, Answers in Genesis still lists it — but it is genuinely contested and is easy to misuse. At most the sodium calculation gives a maximum age (an upper limit of roughly 62 million years on certain assumptions), not the actual age, and even that depends on disputed estimates of how much salt enters and leaves. So it does not show the sea is young; it shows, on certain assumptions, that it could not be older than a ceiling — and the assumptions are exactly what mainstream geologists contest. Fair to mention, wrong to wield as proof. We include it here as the honest in-between: a still-used argument that the careful reader should hold loosely, not a retired one.

Part 2 · The legends — named as legends

Two stories circulate as fact and are simply false. A page about truth has to say so plainly, even though both are told by sincere people to honor God.

NASA's "missing day"

The story: NASA scientists ran the planets backward by computer to plan a mission, and the program halted on a missing day — which turned out to be Joshua's long day (Joshua 10:13) plus Hezekiah's backward shadow, confirming the Bible. The truth: it never happened. There is no such NASA program, calculation, or finding; orbital mechanics cannot even locate an "absolute" day to find one missing. The tale traces to a 1936 book and was popularized by a man named Harold Hill in the 1970s. Answers in Genesis flatly classes it among arguments Christians should not use. Believe Joshua's long day on the authority of Scripture if you will; do not prop it on a NASA story that does not exist.

Darwin's deathbed recantation

The story: on his deathbed Charles Darwin renounced evolution and turned to Christ. The truth: it is the "Lady Hope" tale, first published decades after his death, and Darwin's own family — his daughter Henrietta in particular — flatly denied it: she was there, and said the visit and the recantation never occurred. Historians, and Answers in Genesis itself, regard the story as unsupportable. Whatever one thinks of Darwin, putting words in a dead man's mouth to win a point is a kind of false witness, and the gospel has no need of it.

The honest verdict

None of this touches the real case for a Creator, which this section makes on far firmer ground — the fine-tuning of the universe, the information in the cell, the unsolved origin of life. If anything, clearing out the bad arguments makes the good ones easier to see. The point of this page is a posture: the believer should be quicker than anyone to retire a claim that has failed, to name a legend a legend, and to refuse to defend the truth with something untrue. That is not weakness of faith; it is the strength of it. A God who calls himself the Truth (John 14:6) is not honored by a false proof, however well-meant. "Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding" (Proverbs 23:23) — and selling it includes selling it cheap to win an argument.

Related in this section: How the Great Flood Happened · Radiohalos · The Circular-Dating Objection

Sources are summarized, not reproduced. The moon-dust retraction (A. Snelling & D. Rush) and the classification of the shrinking-sun, c-decay, vapor-canopy, NASA-missing-day, and Darwin-deathbed claims as arguments to avoid are from Answers in Genesis's "Arguments to Avoid" pages and Creation Ministries International's "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use"; the AiG canopy "death bell" wording was verified by direct fetch. The Paluxy man-tracks were withdrawn by the Institute for Creation Research / Films for Christ in the 1980s. The salty-sea (sodium) calculation is still published by AiG (S. Austin & R. Humphreys) as a maximum-age argument and is contested by mainstream geology. The Darwin "Lady Hope" story was denied by his daughter Henrietta; the NASA "missing day" traces to H. Hill's retelling of a 1936 account. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub. This page reports where the evidence stands and treats no contested claim as settled.