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Nobody alive observed the rate of the growth of them a hundred years ago. But the size of them was noted a hundred years ago and is being observed now. A thinking person can assume that the rate of growth 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 250 years ago, 700 years ago, 2000 years ago, 5000 years ago is the same.
I'll make another claim- God changed the laws of physics at the the time of the Great Flood, so evidence from physics doesn't apply before this event. Catastrophic events have happened and science used to admit that.
Were the stalactites growing before the flood or since the flood?
What if I read a book about George Washington that says he threw a coin across a river,(which is impossible) so then conclude that George Washington never existed? Would that be rational?
That's the whole point, I don't know because I did not observe it. A mark of intelligence is to admit he doesn't know. Much "science" claims to know things about history that runs counter to actual history, that isn't intelligent.
I asked because rushing water would have broken most or all of them so they must have begun growing only after the flood water subsided.
Carbon dating is nonsense, but your evidence about stalactites is worth study. Another one is about how many rings there are in trees, a ring in a tree trunk can be assumed to be a year. That kind of evidence is interesting, not fabricated evidence by pseudo intellectuals passing it off to the public as "true" science.
I dealt with that both the question of a mutation increasing a life form's ability to survive and the issue that maybe those genes always existed.
Yet radiometric dating and dendrochronology agree rather exactly.
And I accepted it. I still doubt if the gene is question is a mutation, since even you admit that it's popped up off and on throughout recent history. Let me ask this, has genetic engineers even been able create a hardier crop by introducing "mutations"? There are convincing arguments out there that genetic engineering is a failure and many want the FDA to require foods to be labeled as GMO. Saying artificially introduced mutations have not created a better food supply.
I would say that natural selection is a fact, but evolutional theory requires mutation to improve life. Mutations don't improve life, whether it's through genetic engineering or something natural. But you showed me an example, and I accept it and also doubt it.
Given that such a claim is unfalsifiable (and also unsupportable), there's nothing scientific about it. You could make literally an infinite number of claims about the past being radically different but then having God transform things supernaturally and erasing any evidence left behind to show that it ever happened. So how do you go about determining which past is the most likely? You use Occam's Razor: the model with the fewest assumptions which conforms with existing evidence is most likely to be the correct one. In this case, it is simpler to assume that things are actually the way they appear to be rather than some grand cosmic conspiracy having taken place one or more times in the past. Otherwise, you could just as easily argue that one can't find their car keys because Satan hid them in an attempt to keep the person from driving to church. Or maybe they just misplaced them. Or maybe the dog knocked them under the couch after playing with them. In light of Occam's Razor, does the Satan scenario seem likely at all? It's just as sensible as saying that "things were different in the past but now God changed them" because the supporting evidence for either scenario is zero.
It's interesting that you say this because the earlier post where you say that God could have created false memories in our minds refutes it. You might remember that you saw something, but that memory could be a fake one implanted by God. So there's no way you can know for sure. If you are going to seriously consider the possibility that God is deceptive and changes things around without any ability to know different, then there is no reason to take any of your own observations seriously. There would be literally no way to tell truth from fiction. No way to tell a true memory from a false one. So how can one reason at all like that?
Of course many claims aren't scientific. Does a claim have to be a scientific claim to be a legitimate claim? Do you believe Science has a monopoly on Truth? Or do you believe the scientific method is the only method to derive truth? Philosophy has determined at least 5 methods to find truth, at least.
"Truth" is not singular, nor found in just one arena of our experiences. But if we eliminate objectivity in any area, we can easily be misled into believing all sorts of falsehoods. Science relies on objectivity-- religion does not. That doesn't mean that religion is wrong, only that we cannot verify most of the basic beliefs found within them.
There is no competition between religion and science. Charles Darwin himself was a religious man. But when a field of discipline ventures beyond the realm of what that discipline can do, and then infringed on another discipline, that's arrogant. When pseudo intellectuals pass off "scientific' claims making statements about history, they infringe on historians who might know a hell of a lot more than was thought. The scientific method, I have no fault with it. Like some jobs need a screw driver, some require a power drill, and some jobs require something different like a wrench. There are many disciplines of study, but some people are beginning to believe Science will solve their problems and answer all the questions, like Science is a god.