So how fast does evolution proceed? How do the religous fundamentalists explain the 'old' look of the earth and certain observable scientific facts that contradict a 'young Earth'?

I visited a tourist attraction at the weekend - somewhere that was one of my inspirations for studying geology. It was Wookey Hole caves. A giant underground cave complex in the Mendip Hills in the UK. Apart from the blatent tourist line fed to visitors about a witch turned to stone by a monk (clearly untrue but a fun story), and the superficial way that the geology was explained (I found myself doing a more specialist guide tour explaining some of the features and deposits) - necessary for the range of ages and science understanding of the visitors, I found myself yet again turning to creationist claims and finding huge holes and gaps in their interpretation of the evidence and a total lack of understanding of science and geology.

I simply offer 1 thing - the formation of stalagmites and stalactites. We can, and have measured the rates of formation for well over a hundred years. We have descriptions of the caves going back over a thousand years; these wonderfully impressive formations take hundreds of thousands of years to build in caves - yet we are told that the earth is less than 10,000 years old.

What explanation can the creationist come up with?

The only ones that fit are:

1. They formed faster in the begining and have slowed down.
2. They were created almost fully formed when the Earth was created.

This took me back to a creationist meeting I attended where the explanation for the apparent age of the universe according to measurements of the distances between ourseleves and other atronomical bodies using the speed of light as a constant and measuring light years and extrapolating from this the age of the universe was the simple retort that aetheistic scientists assume that the speed of light is constant, whereas it could have slowed down! And this came from a PhD scientist! I was so gob smacked that I just laughed at him. He then informed me that despite the fact I was being disrespectful, I should know that science has managed to slow the speed of light to almost a standstill experimentally (which is true).

Of course, when I stated that I would happily show him there and then how to slow doown the speed of light using a diamond or any other transparent or translucent material, he scoffed at me. It was clear that he had no understanding of the properties of light and that when light travels in a vacuum (space) its speed is indeed constant but that when it travels from one mediumk to another it can indeed be slowed down. A stick apparently bending in a glass of water demonstrates this just as well.