In your case, if I were a scientist I would hypothesize from the evidence available to me that there was a different form of thinking you used before you were exposed to Protestant ideas.
seriously, have you ever read what the Fathers have to say about Genesis? you would apparently think they are Protestants.
So science CAN account for catastrophes and cataclysms.
how does uniformitarianism account for such things? for instance with carbon dating, it must be assumed that the half-life of carbon has always been the same -- but theres no way of proving that. it could have either had uniform half-lives, or the half-lives could have changed, but theres no way of knowing that. all we know is how much carbon is there now, and how much a half-life is now.
from wikipedia regarding half-lives:
A quantity is said to be subject to exponential decay if it decreases at a rate proportional to its value. Symbolically, this can be expressed as the following differential equation, where N is the quantity and λ is a positive number called the decay constant:
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\frac{dN}{dt} = -\lambda N.The solution to this equation is:
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N(t) = N_0 e^{-\lambda t}. \,Here N(t) is the quantity at time t, and N0 = N(0) is the (initial) quantity, at time t=0.
This is the form of the equation that is most commonly used to describe exponential decay. The constant of integration N0 denotes the original quantity at t = 0. (The notation λ for the decay constant is a remnant of the usual notation for an eigenvalue. In this case, λ is the eigenvalue of the opposite of the differentiation operator with N(t) as the corresponding eigenfunction).
now how do they know the initial quantity? perhaps more assumptions?
