There are other related difficulties, whilst acknowledging the Earth and universe could have pre-existed the first creative day. My favourites relate to how they go about explaining flood geology and the rapid rate of speciation needed to get from created "kinds" to those around at the time of the flood in 1656 years and from "flood kinds" to our current biodiversity and biogeography in 4390 years (2370 BCE flood date to present).
As late as 1987 they were suggesting each of these creative days was just 7,000 years long.
*** w87 1/1 p. 30 Questions From Readers ***
“Second, a study of the fulfillment of Bible prophecy and of our location in the stream of time strongly indicate that each of the creative days (Genesis, chapter 1) is 7,000 years long. It is understood that Christ’s reign of a thousand years will bring to a close God’s 7,000-year ‘rest day,’ the last ‘day’ of the creative week. (Revelation 20:6; Genesis 2:2, 3) Based on this reasoning, the entire creative week would be 49,000 years long.”
I'm not quite sure why they've not wholly abandoned this antiscientific nonsense a long time ago. It is a long standing belief which you'll find at least as far back as Rutherford Photodrama of Creation. That means they pretty much have to reject radiometric dating and other dating techniques which arrive at the conclusion that life has been around for considerably longer than they suggest.
More recent articles do seem to say things like the creation process could have been "many tens of thousands of years" or something similar, but they never seem to stretch to hundreds of millions of years.
The next problem lies in this "animals were vegetarian before the flood" nonsense. Here's a Questions from Readers discussing how to cram all those animals into the Ark.
*** w61 12/15 p. 767 Questions From Readers ***
"All those creatures, human and subhuman, were able to live without flesh for a whole year inside the ark. Why could not every one of those living creatures live without flesh during 1,656 years prior to the Flood, or back to the time when God specified to Adam and Eve in Eden what he had given to earthly creatures as food? And if they could subsist that way during the first 1,656 years of man’s existence, why can they not return to that way of life and keep living that way during the thousand-year reign of Jesus Christ and then for eternity?"
That explanation leaves open the possibility that animals might have eaten flesh before Jehovah handed Adam and Eve the keys to Eden and they only became vegetarian one humans were around. That idea is scuppered in this later Questions from Readers piece.
*** g83 1/8 p. 28 From Our Readers ***
"We did not claim that certain features evolved by adaptation, but that existing features were put to a different use from what was originally purposed. We do not believe it is possible to establish for a certainty how things were in the distant past by observing the present. Conditions have changed. But we do have a clear statement from the past, namely Genesis 1:29, 30: “And God went on to say: ‘Here I have given to you all vegetation bearing seed which is on the surface of the whole earth and every tree on which there is the fruit of a tree bearing seed. To you let it serve as food. And to every wild beast of the earth and to every flying creature of the heavens and to everything moving upon the earth and in which there is life as a soul I have given all green vegetation for food.’” This does not mean that vegetation was merely the ultimate basis for food supply through a chain of animal life. Obviously it was not the case with humans because later when they were to begin to get some nourishment from animal flesh they had to be given a special concession. (Genesis 9:3) Further, during the Flood of Noah’s day, eight humans and ‘flying creatures and all moving animals of the ground’ were obliged to live on vegetable matter exclusively for more than a year. (Genesis 6:17-21) And the fact that Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25 specifically state that former predators will be at peace with other animals, and the lion will eat straw like the bull, would seem to confirm that animals and humans were meant to be vegetation eaters."
I guess it is possible to explain away a T-Rex tooth embedded in the tail of a hadrosaur as occurring as a result of a disagreement about which animal was going to eat those tasty leaves rather than pointing conclusively to a desire for flesh.
See here
T. rex Tooth Crown Found Embedded in an Edmontosaurus Tail – Predatory Behaviour?
Coprolites pose a different problem. Coprolites are fossilised turds. A coprolite containing bone fragments would indicate carnivory, whether from scavenging or from hunting, and therefore must, according to the JW's be post flood. The problem is that these are not that uncommon, and go back over 200m years (by conventional dates).
The 210-million-year-old Smok was crushing bones like a hyena
The obvious conclusion is that Noah must have taken dinosaurs and other predators which subsequently became extinct onto the ark.
I'm not aware of any attempt by the Org to propose just where scientists are getting their data wrong when they come up with the crazy notion that animals might have eaten flesh more than 4400 years ago. That such a notion contradicts their interpretation of the Bible does not mean it didn't happen. Rather than equip themselves with PhD's in related disciplines and go out and do some serious lab and field work and show how their map of time is right they prefer to carp from the sidelines and make disparaging remarks about people who actually do take the time to understand their field.
So to the "You see, when the water canopy above the earth came down during Noah's flood, it changed the amount of radiation reaching the earth's surface and thus all dating systems which produce an age more than 4000 years ago are flawed" argument.
Do they ever explain what happened to all the heat produced by collapsing a few hundred million years worth of radioactive decay into just the last few thousand years? Why wasn't Noah boiled alive bobbing about in his coffin on a boiling sea?
Ask a JW where the boundary layer which marks Noah's flood is or what features of your local geography are a result of the flood. I've not met one who has seriously paused to consider the consequences on their environment their beliefs being true would have.
