Okay ... here's a statement then:
OK, I'll play one of your games today...
Embedded age creation is the best explanation that melds short time with oldness.
That may be, but as I would argue, there is no reason to do that. (I'll defer discussion of "oldness" to the end.)
It is the best explanation for how something can be so old it falls apart with age, yet came into existence a second ago.
What exactly is falling apart with age? I could (but won't bother for the distraction) make long lists of things that are much older than your 6000 years (in your view embedded with that age) and not falling apart and many things that are falling apart that are much younger than 6000 years. While decay takes time not all things decay at the same rate, or at all (like protons).
It is the best explanation for how a man can appear suddenly, and be accountable for his actions.
Anthropology shows that the appearance of humans isn't "sudden", but perhaps you don't care about that.
As far as "accountability" that would seem to be the theologically important thing. The theology is of no concern of mine, but having experienced it, I know there are ways to get that accountability within in the stories structure without distorting the historical and scientific record. I'm just not interested in the naked woman eating fruit. (Strike that, maybe I am...)
What we need is a serious discussion on the nature of "dating" (no not that kind, put that fruit down).
For historical documents we can take the dates quoted in them at face value (sometimes with complicated efforts to link counters that aren't identical but do overlap), but for objects (the things that we will claim are more than 6000 years old) they aren't "date stamped". (To use one of your phrases).
Instead we use processes that take time and the evidence they leave behind to demonstrate that time passed and of a certain amount.
For example, when we see the naked young man in the garden, we might assume that he took about 20 years to grow that size and appearance from a single cell based on our experience. Now you might say that this creator wanted a fully formed man capable of reason so he was created fully mature. And, that's fine, the garden story wouldn't work that well if the main character was too immature to talk or reasons.
We can look at the trees in the garden and say that not having grown from seedlings, they would not need annual growth rings in their trunks and if we found 50 rings we might take this as evidence that it had taken 50 years for the tree to grow. If it was freshly created there would be no need for it to have rings. Now it could be that the alternating pattern of denser and softer wood tissues make an ideal structure for the trunk with both strength and water transport capability. So you might say
it was better to create it that way for strength and utility. Fine.
But the garden and it's occupants aren't available for our examination. So let's examine something else. Something much older than 6000 years.
Consider a mineral that chemically incorporates potassium (K). When we examine the detailed isotopic chemistry we find that it contains K-39 and a smaller amount of the isotope K-40. Among the other things in the mineral is some argon, specifically, Ar-40. No other noble gasses (like neon) are found in the mineral. We find that there is the same amount of Ar-40 as Kr-40. (I have constructed this ratio for later simplicity.)
Because we can conduct experiments on other samples of this mineral, we know what conditions are required to from it (temperature, density, etc.) and we know that the noble gasses do not integrate into the mineral. So it should have formed with no Ar-40, but if there was some argon in the mineral it would remain trapped.
Also, from nuclear physics experiments, we know that K-40 decays to Ar-40. This gives us a possible cause -- some of the K-40 in the original mineral decayed to Ar-40 and it is still trapped. The chemistry and nuclear physics requires that the original amount of K-40 was the sum of the current amounts of K-40 plus the current Ar-40. Since these are equal, this tells us that half of the original K-40 decayed since the mineral formed. So the age of the mineral (time since formation) is the half-life of K-40 (1.25 billion years).
The formation of Ar-40 by nuclear decays within the mineral are a process that takes time. There is no "functional" reason for the mineral to have a little Ar-40 mixed in like we might excuse for Adam and the garden trees appearance of decades of growth.
There are many such markers of the passage of time that we can see today. For most of them we can't put forth a plausible structural reason for it to be so. This leaves us with only two logical conclusions:
1. The mineral *IS* 1.25 billion years old and formed without krypton, but some formed from the decay of K-40.
2. The creator of the mineral put equal amounts of K-40 and Ar-40 into the mineral so some hapless isotopic geochemist would make the measurement and be *TRICKED* into thinking the rock was 1.25 billion years old.
This is why you won't get much backing from believers trying to accept the measurements of age and the literal chronology implied by endless genealogies. It makes the creator look like the biggest liar of them all.
This isn't rocket science.
Correct. It is geology, archeology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and so many more.
