"As a side note", most people understand the Scriptures as not being an actual account of geologic history....are you familiar with the Scriptures and what they are about?
Yes. And I agree with you that only an idiot, or a mendacious atheist intent on making his opponents appear to have the worst possible arguments, would insist that Scripture conveys an actual account of geologic history.
Only those without basic spiritual discernment try to attack the validity of the Scriptures via such a novice approach...amusing, but ineffective to say the least.
I think you misunderstand me. I am not "attacking" the Scriptures. On the contrary, I am arguing for a sophisticated understanding of Scripture. I think we are in agreement here.
so, your evidence is a theory that is what i was asking for evidence of?
Let me be specific....
prove your following claim with actual empirical evidence
"The rate of decay does not change any more over a period of a billion years than it does over a period of a million or a thousand years, or a single year."(emphasis mine)
This is where we depart. You are misunderstanding the state of knowledge of atomic physics. Obviously there is no "empirical evidence" to the effect that decay rates don't change over a period of a billion years, since in order to have such evidence we would need to have a billion years of decay rate data as opposed to the hundred or so years of data that we actually have.
However, this data is unnecessary to the point at hand, since if our understanding of things like nuclear decay rates were wrong, we wouldn't be able to build e.g. PET scanners. Science is not like a quilt that you can put a hole in one part but the rest of the quilt is still there. Some parts of science are like that, and some disciplines operate pretty much independently of each other, but quantum mechanics is absolutely not like that.
If nuclear decay rates were variable (apart from the fact that decay reactions are statistical, probabilistic processes) then our whole understanding of atomic physics would be completely wrong. We would be so wrong that there wouldn't be any way to, for example, build an atomic bomb. In fact a lot of the people who worked on the atomic bomb had gotten their start by working on nuclear decay; Fermi for instance received his Nobel in 1938 for his work on neutrons, which was an extension of his work on beta decay. It was only possible to build the atom bomb because our understanding of e.g. decay rates was so accurate, and so intimately related to our understanding of every other facet of nuclear physics.
So I do understand why it sounds weird to quote a "theory" in support of an argument, but quantum mechanics isn't "just a theory," it is a verified and very well understood description of how atomic-scale phenomena work. Is there more to learn? Sure. But in much the same way that general relativity didn't replace Newton's law of gravitation, only expanded upon it and demonstrated that it was a special case for low-energy phenomena, any future developments in e.g. quantum electrodynamics or quantum gravity will absolutely have to account for what we already know, which is that half-lives, like spectral lines, are an inherent property of the nuclei under consideration.
