One of the largest reasons why atheists and evolutionists deny the scientifically valid proposition of creation is that it cannot be disproved. If one accepts a literal translation of Genesis, then you can disprove Creation. If you can prove that any organism is greater than 6,000 (roughly) years old; then a literal interpretation of Genesis can be proven false. You are probably saying that I'm asking for something ridiculous. Nope. We can date trees back. In fact, the oldest living organism (according to Google) known to man is 5,100 years old.
This is at least as good as evolution; which can be disproven if you happen to find a rabbit buried with a dinosaur. Which is perhaps impossible, irregardless. While they existed at the same time, they may just never have been buried together. Besides, we already know that Evolutionists would merely shift their theory to allow rabbits in their delusional world before time. Evolution once denied mammals and dinosaurs at the same time, now dinosaurs exist with "basic" mammals. Convergent evolution is another example of the shifting theory of Evolution, and no mountain of evidence could disprove it.
Let's imagine they dig up a dinosaur with human bones in it's stomach. Evolutionists would no doubt insist it was buried later. Or they might claim that humans evolved in their "land before time". Perhaps even a race of man just like our own, but yet, unrelated to us.
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Actually, I'd say that the provability of the creation account (theory?) is not directly tied to digging up and dating things. You point out that scientists, evolutionists and creationists alike, can always make their theory more complicated to explain some individual pieces of evidence. The real problem is God. You can't disprove God, and putting Him in your theory is a big step.
Even though matching the facts is the most important property of a theory, a theory can be expanded to account for existing facts even if they contradict the original, simpler version. A secondary property, simplicity, becomes important for distinguishing two competing theories. Basically, you want a theory that predicts as little as possible, and for all the things that it predicts to be true.
For example, evolution didn't find all the intermediate forms that it predicted, so the theory got a lot more complicated with punctuated equilibrium, which predicts that very few intermediate forms made it into the fossil record due to species change happening rapidly. Complicated is worse--one way of disproving the theory disappeared. Except that the original theory was wrong--it said that the rocks ought to be full of intermediate forms.
As a theory, creation is pretty simple compared to evolution (although this is partly because there aren't many scientists hammering on the corner cases to make it fit newly discovered facts). The real problem is that you need God for key points, like the creation of life, and setting off the flood. This opens you up to the criticism that "Requiring God to do steps 2 and 3 in your theory is cheating because you just explain steps 2 and 3 as 'because God did it' and don't say how."
So the basic problem is that science tries to explain things completely and, for atheists, any step in the process for which a creationist says "God did this", they count this as a step that doesn't have its mechanism fully explained. They reason that evolution is a big hairy theory these days, but at least none of the steps are explained away by God.
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Also, strongly atheist scientists tend to characterise religion as discouraging scientific enquiry because believers will say (1) "God did it, I don't care to go asking why" (2) "God didn't mean for us to know why".
That's basically a straw man, one worldview vs another; I've heard Christians say both, but never Christians who are scientists. See eg Planet of the Apes for this line of thought in pop culture. The original. The new one is just MST3K fodder with no philosophy on the side.
Atheists also say that Christian scientists hurt scientific enquiry because it makes them intellectually dishonest: if you put God in at step 2, why not just stick him at any step you're stuck on? This is actually a valid criticism--people have done this off and for a long time, eg Edmond Halley. But Christians shouldn't do this; theories should be informed by what the Bible says but that doesn't give you permission to ignore evidence that says the earth orbits the sun instead of the other way round.
I don't think this is a problem with creation science today; it has bigger problems, like the fact that there aren't very many scientists in the field; there are way too many publicists and political agitators. Most of them have some agenda that it more important to them than discovering truth. This sucks, because it means that scientists not involved in the creation/evolution debate feel like they can safely ignore creation as pseudo-science because only pseudo-scientists are doing it.
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Note on changing theories. Casting doubt on a theory because it changes is like complaining when somebody fixes their buggy code. What you really need to complain about what a big hairy ball their code is when they've patched it for the umpteenth time. Or, to play the devil's advocate, the fact that they rely on a proprietary, closed-source, black-box API to reduce their code to a couple of method calls. You know, "Earth.init(new Life()); ... Earth.flood(worldwide=true)"
Addendum: I just read your 18 April post on Expelled. I completely agree that the core issue for the people involved in creation vs evolution is that evolutionists want to avoid God. Science is just a procedure for finding things out. You can do a whole bunch of science* to back up what you want to believe, but it can only go so far in deciding the best theory, or the theory that you personally believe.
*And make a neat gun, for the people who are still alive.
Awesome comment. I agree that atheists just want to avoid God, and thus like to feel logical in choosing Evolution over Creation. I'm not so much saying they have buggy code so much as that they should have realized their entire framework is shot, and all their code is worthless. It's like they wrote a function to find the speed of an object at any given point in time, and then decided to just ignore time, and not use it in their code. It just won't compute, no matter how many times you change it. And just like that, Origins won't compute without God. He's a vital part of the equation.
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