....To the OP question, 'plausibile' implies either 'doesn't contradict anything already held to be true' or 'provides adequate evidence to justify overturning pre-existing beliefs that contradict the claim'. To someone who knows nothing, nothing is implausible. But the more you know, the fewer plausible claims there are. YEC contradicts vast swathes of human knowledge, most of which has been thoroughly tested against reality. It's possible to find YEC plausible ONLY by discarding those vast swathes of human knowledge; Or by deliberately avoiding learning them. The number of educational fields that you must be hugely ignorant of in order to find YEC plausible is astonishing. Geology is just one of those many fields.
I think it is a bit more complicated than that. When I was in high school I had a lot of YEC books and magazines.... one was a
400 page book devoted to "ape-man" fossils....
Another was a book full of counter-arguments called the Answers book.
Here is the latest version of that:
https://answersingenesis.org/store/product/new-answers-book-combo/
That collection has more than 100 counter-arguments to common objections to YEC.
In 1996 the local library had two anti-YEC books. The first one was professional but I didn't find it persuasive because I was already familiar with related counter-arguments.
The other book was the Australian anti-YEC book, "Telling Lies for God". I criticized it on my "dirt or slime" website:
https://web.archive.org/web/2000030...cities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/4123/HYPMAIN.HTM
I wrote "...I only give a few examples for each catergory of error to reduce loading times and personal effort....." (and I was being serious)
Also:
Anti-Creationists quoted about "Telling Lies For God"
"...the book really is riddled with errors and omissions of crucial facts." - Jim Lippard
"...Plimer's new book is a shoddily-written polemic that, in places, verges on the hysterical." - Jeffrey Shallit
These are all problems that I found as a first year university math student.
Even though I'm no longer a YEC I think I am good at rapidly finding YEC counter-arguments for most anti-YEC topics....
Reality isn't a debating society, and arguments don't stand or fall based on how convincing they sound, but only on how well they conform with observation.
The body of knowledge we call 'science' is massively interconnected, and the scientific method consists of maximising its conformity to observation, and maximising its internal consistency. Any claim that contradicts observation, or that contradicts any part of the existing structure of knowledge, requires investigation and testing - ideally against observation.
Over four centuries of applying this method has created a massive body of knowledge, and claims (such as a young Earth) that contradict large numbers of disparate parts of this body of knowledge require massive and compelling evidence to even be worthy of serious consideration. No such evidence exists for the age of the Earth to be less than several thousand million years, and a considerable number of independent approaches to determining upper and lower bounds for possible ages of the Earth produce compatible results.
The only way to overturn these results is to produce compelling evidence in the form of observation, and of theory that conforms with both new and historical observations, for a different result.
It's not an impossible task in principle; But YECs haven't even attempted it, instead relying on emotional appeals, arguments from ignorance, and attempts to sway opinion via rhetoric rather than logic, reason, and observation.
Until they make a serious effort to do actual science, rather than producing cargo-cult claims that vaguely resemble science to audiences unfamiliar with what the scientific method entails, claims of plausibility are a pathetic joke.
They're claiming victory, without even bothering to learn the rules of the game, much less to play it. It's utterly sad and lame, but there's plenty of people who assume (incorrectly) that they can tell truth from falsehood without learning how to do that - or worse, after learning techniques that cannot possibly be effective - to keep the stupidity alive.
The ultimate test though is utility. Science
works, bitches. No amount of sophistry can obscure that inconvenient fact.
Arguing against little bits and pieces is meaningless. Sure, you might find an apparently compelling diatribe against, say, radiometric dating; But for radiometric dating to be flawed doesn't only imply that our established age for the Earth is wrong - it implies that the whole of Quantum theory is deeply wrong. And it's not - we checked. If it were wrong, wrong enough to discredit radiometric dating and open up the possibility that the Earth is young, then a whole swathe of superficially unrelated ideas would also have to be wrong. Which would imply that all the massive technological progress of the twentieth century, which we based on those theories, worked by pure dumb luck. Which is complete madness.
The technology that makes this conversation possible couldn't exist if our understanding of how everything behaves was sufficiently flawed as to render radiometric dating valueless.
A young Earth is, as I said earlier, only plausible to people who know very little (or nothing) about how reality actually works. Such ignorance was excusable a thousand years ago; And was understandable (though less excusable) a hundred and fifty years ago. But it really isn't today.
We know stuff. We don't expect anyone to believe it, because we can show them how to check for themselves. We can stand on the shoulders of giants, and see further and better than at any time in the history of humanity. And yet so many people are still grubbing in the dirt our ancestors left behind, pretending that their vision is as far ranging as anyone's. Because they know how to sound "clever" for an ignorant audience, and can win debates by acclaim, despite having zero solid basis for their beliefs.
It's not just pathetic; It's insulting.
