Does an Extraordinary Claim Require Extraordinary Evidence?

Just a short little summary of hopefully upcoming article : yes, that's why I believe Creationism. And Geocentrism.

"Earth is not flat"

Not too extraordinary. Where the terrain is uneven, flat or not cannot be very well verified by eye and where it is a very flat terrain like the sea, it tends to show some evidence Earth is round, as in non-flat. Like horizons seen from exceptionally high places being round. Like horizons moving closer or further away with your height above ground.

And round as in complete globe? More probable than chapati pan "disc" (since that one is an incomplete globe), but also actually proven by Magellan.

"Earth really spins each day, and also orbits the sun each year"

This is way more extraordinary. It is not like what we see is just a bit off from a claim we know, it is a claim we are supposed to know reverses what we see, re-identifies what is moving and what isn't.

And therefore, even if it takes God, angels, an aether, reformulating laws about speed of light (as applying to movement through ether, not through local space as such), geocentrism is more probable as the less extraordinary claim.

"Earth is millions of years old"

OK, you are a Buddhist? You have read up on the history of one billion years in the library of Lhasa or sth?

You know, I am a Christian, I have read Genesis and some more of the Bible, find it more reliable than the library of Lhasa.

If I were Kemetist, I'd believe in c. 40 000 years of history. If I were a Zuist, maybe a few hundred thousand years (as per Sumerian Kinglist).

If I were a Jew I'd believe Heaven and Earth were created 5779 years ago, a Protestant I might go for 6021 years ago. Btw, that is not offlimits for Catholics either, if you believe the Vulgate over the Roman Martyrology as best edition of Biblical chronology. And if I were a Byzantine, I'd be placing St Hippolytus of Rome with a 5500 BC date over the chronology we get from St Jerome.

So, I go with the story I find best Catholic, Heaven and Earth created in 5199 BC or even 5200 BC. But Ussher's and Syncellus' chronologies are not offlimits either.

"No, I didn't mean the library of Lhasa, even if that earns some laughs, I meant like scientific dating methods!"

W H A T ?

That is a very extraordinary claim (about dates not calibrated by known history with certain or near certain chronology, meaning carbon dates these last 2000 years or some more), and considering carbon 14 levels can have gone up and argon levels can be due to excess argon (like lava cooling quicker in water, if t happened during Flood), you very much do NOT have any extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim. At ALL.

Especially as Geocentrism makes most of cosmic distance ladder (as any distance that can be considered stellar) very moot. Which takes very well care of the Distant Starlight "paradox" on other versions of Young Earth Creationism.

Believing history is not believing an extraordinary claim, it is, at its best, believing men remember most things mostly correctly and mostly do not lie about what they remember, so the narratives confirming each other (or when several of them are presumably conflated into one by a historiographer) are pretty believable. Even if that involves believing miracles.

Not sure if I'll make all of the longer article, or if I'll take autobiographic parts as a separate one, after all.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St. Thomas Aquinas
7.III.2019