Oldest fossils on Earth found in Australia, provides proof of life on planet 3.4 billion years ago

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292559의 게시글

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xaratherus의 게시글

6,000 - 8,000 years.

slaps his buzzer

What is not the correct answer for how old the Earth really is, Alex?

204878의 게시글

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Squishalot의 게시글

6,000 - 8,000 years.

slaps his buzzer

What is not the correct answer for how old the Earth really is, Alex?

You have no proof!

Irrespective of what the ignorant YECs say to you, the key point is that even if the Earth (and universe) was created 6000 years ago, there is no reason why carbon dating would have to give you a 6000 year result, any moreso than the fact that the stars wouldn't be visible because light hadn't gotten here yet. The creation of the universe (in a Biblical sense) is not necessarily a static starting point.

Case in point - by the Biblical argument, God created a man. He didn't give birth to a baby, which subsequently grew into a man, he created a man, of some positive age. Biologically, this man was not 5 seconds old, 5 seconds after his creation. Any hypothetical test you could apply relating to his age would not give you a 5 second result. Likewise, there is no need to assume that a 6000 year old Earth will return statistics that must say that the Earth is 6000 years old, because it may have been created 'old' already.

(Skree, I'll reply to your point on our philosophy discussion afterwards.)(##RESPBREAK##)8##DELIM##Squishalot##DELIM##

xaratherus의 게시글

You have no proof!

Irrespective of what the ignorant YECs say to you, the key point is that even if the Earth (and universe) was created 6000 years ago, there is no reason why carbon dating would have to give you a 6000 year result, any moreso than the fact that the stars wouldn't be visible because light hadn't gotten here yet. The creation of the universe (in a Biblical sense) is not necessarily a static starting point.

Case in point - by the Biblical argument, God created a man. He didn't give birth to a baby, which subsequently grew into a man, he created a man, of some positive age. Biologically, this man was not 5 seconds old, 5 seconds after his creation. Any hypothetical test you could apply relating to his age would not give you a 5 second result. Likewise, there is no need to assume that a 6000 year old Earth will return statistics that must say that the Earth is 6000 years old, because it may have been created 'old' already.

(Skree, I'll reply to your point on our philosophy discussion afterwards.)

There really is proof - and your proposed situation requires that we discard some of our observations based on available evidence.

Carbon dating is, to my knowledge, similar to radiometric dating, in that it measures the rate of decay of carbon isotopes in the test object. The method has been "calibrated" by dating objects with a documented age - i.e., we took something we know to have been made in the 12th century based on external corroboration, and then used carbon dating and received a result that it had been created in/around the 12th century (with a "small" margin of error).

More long-range radiometric dating is based on the same principle - the decay rate of certain isotopes/elements within the object, and using the current "state' of it in the object to determine age. Those decay rates have been determined based on properties of those, and other, elements and isotopes. We haven't obviously been able to test that a certain element decays at a rate of, let's say, one magnitude every million years - but we have been able to test other isotopes/elements and determined that based on their properties, they decay at this rate, and so isotope X should have a decay rate of Y.

What you're asking is that we assume that there's some sort of unidentified catalyst that alters the extrapolated rates of decay to give us a false result. But why would we presume that? Based on the Bible, and the YEC's interpretation of it (one out of 38,000+ worldwide, I might add)? Hell, the YEC's presumed creation date of 6000-10,000 years ago is itself based on extrapolation - from unverified genealogies at that. And the calculation is contradicted within the book itself, because it's based on observed human lifespan, whereas the Bible proposes that people in that era lived to be 500+ years old; basing it on that would actually put the age of the Earth at more like 300,000-500,000 years.

A researcher can show you exactly how carbon dating works, can show you its accuracy using objects with ages corroborated through other means, can show you the formulas that illustrate how and why decay occurs, why that rate is constant based on certain properties of the elements/isotopes in question, and what the decay rate should be for isotopes with other properties based on that.

Someone stated something similar on Facebook. What you seem to be asking me to do is to presume that the YEC's claim could be true simply because it's not proven false, even though there's piles of scientific data that their claim is dead-wrong - and that's just ridiculous.

You say that I don't have proof. What I don't have proof of is an object that was created yesterday but that shows a radiometric-dated age of 3 billion years ago. Show me that, and then the YECs have an argument with some validity.

Monday의 게시글

6,000 - 8,000 years.

slaps his buzzer

What is not the correct answer for how old the Earth really is, Alex?

You called?

Skreeran의 게시글

xaratherus의 게시글

Orangutan의 게시글

an object that was created yesterday but that shows a radiometric-dated age of 3 billion years ago.

Something tells me that YECs would be really big fans of Terry Pratchett, especially if they like the idea of things that have been there for thousands of years but weren't there two months ago.

Squishalot의 게시글

*sigh* xaratherus, for someone who argues for tolerance and understanding for the gay community, you're so entirely closed minded it's not funny.

You're completely missing the point that I have no issues with the scientific reasoning behind carbon dating.

You're completely missing the point that I'm not trying to say that we can't extrapolate our carbon dating results due to some mysterious catalyst.

I'm saying that in the Biblical case:

a) God created Adam.
b) A scientist comes through 5 seconds later.
c) The scientist tests how old Adam is, and he appears to be a young healthy male of 25 (say), not 5 seconds old.

Likewise:

a) God created the Earth.
b) A scientist comes through 6000 years later.
c) The scientist tests how old the Earth is, and it appears to be a old healthy planet of 4.5billion (say), not 6000 years old.

My point is, God has (by Biblical account) created items that are scientifically demonstrated to be aged prior to creation (i.e. is created with the attributes of an aged object). Why is it implausible that in the same account, the earth was also created as an aged object? If you build a house in The Sims, and you install a weatherworn roof, to the Sim living there, is the roof 5 seconds old, or is it aged and weatherworn?

So did God create the universe to look 13.7 billion years old to troll us, or did Satan make everything look older than it is to test your faith?

Arguably (and this is my agnostic intepretation of the Creation event), it was either created 13.7 billion years old because that's the look and feel that God wanted it to be (same way he wanted Adam to be a reproducing male, and for all the animals to be reproductively viable upon creation) if you take the YEC view, or the interpretation of Genesis should refer to long time periods or 'ages' as opposed to 'days', in which case, the events in the first passage of Genesis are not wholly contradictory to what science tells us.(##RESPBREAK##)8##DELIM##Squishalot##DELIM##

292559의 게시글

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204878의 게시글

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Skreeran의 게시글

Arguably (and this is my agnostic intepretation of the Creation event), it was either created 13.7 billion years old because that's the look and feel that God wanted it to be (same way he wanted Adam to be a reproducing male, and for all the animals to be reproductively viable upon creation) if you take the YEC view, or the interpretation of Genesis should refer to long time periods or 'ages' as opposed to 'days', in which case, the events in the first passage of Genesis are not wholly contradictory to what science tells us.The latter still doesn't work, because science tells us that birds came after reptiles (rather than before) and that the Sun was around long before the Earth.

That only leaves the former: That God created the world to "look" like it came about in a different manner than it did.

In which case I reply: Why does this god want us to believe the events of the Bible, when all the evidence he created points to a different conclusion?

And thus I subscribe to the third option: That the book was written by desert nomads thousands of years ago who didn't understand physics and geology and biology as well as we do now.

Squishalot의 게시글

The latter still doesn't work, because science tells us that birds came after reptiles (rather than before) and that the Sun was around long before the Earth.

I'm re-reading Genesis 1 to confirm that. Genesis states:

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.”

And later states:

And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so.

Arguably, the first reptiles were born from amphibians. If the water 'teemed with living creatures', that could easily be interpreted (from a reconciliatory point of view) that the water creatures evolved into reptiles, which evolved into birds. There's no real reason to suggest that reptiles must fall under Genesis 1:24 rather than Genesis 1:20, which would seem to apply more closely to mammals. If you take the interpretation that reptiles evolved in the same 'age' as birds and water animals, as opposed to the same 'age' as mammals, it's not really inconsistent with what science tells us.

That only leaves the former: That God created the world to "look" like it came about in a different manner than it did.

In which case I reply: Why does this god want us to believe the events of the Bible, when all the evidence he created points to a different conclusion?

Again, I pose the Sims argument - why would you want anything you create to 'look' like anything?

And thus I subscribe to the third option: That the book was written by desert nomads thousands of years ago who didn't understand physics and geology and biology as well as we do now.

That's not a valid option in the context of the Creation viewpoint and you know it. If you're not interested in having a serious discussion, don't spew rhetoric bluster in the first place.(##RESPBREAK##)8##DELIM##Squishalot##DELIM##

Skreeran의 게시글

Arguably, the first reptiles were born from amphibians. If the water 'teemed with living creatures', that could easily be interpreted (from a reconciliatory point of view) that the water creatures evolved into reptiles, which evolved into birds. There's no real reason to suggest that reptiles must fall under Genesis 1:24 rather than Genesis 1:20, which would seem to apply more closely to mammals. If you take the interpretation that reptiles evolved in the same 'age' as birds and water animals, as opposed to the same 'age' as mammals, it's not really inconsistent with what science tells us.Bro. Reptiles move along the ground, not in the water. That's the reason they evolved scales to be able to keep their moisture inside of them, and leathery eggs that didn't have to stay in the water. Some reptiles, like Mosasaurs, Turtles, and Marine Iguanas, later returned to the water, but the very reason reptiles exist distinctly from amphibians is so they move along the ground instead of being confined to areas near large bodies of water.

Incidentally, the first birds evolved from reptiles about 70 million years after the first true mammals showed up, and roughly 360 million years after the first fish.

Again, I pose the Sims argument - why would you want anything you create to 'look' like anything?Why else would he make everything look billions of years older than it actually is?

That's not a valid option in the context of the Creation viewpoint and you know it. If you're not interested in having a serious discussion, don't spew rhetoric bluster in the first place.Of course it's not, because I am not a creationist. I find creationism to be extremely unlikely, if just because forcing it to conform to the evidence we have now makes it sounds like a conspiracy theory. "Okay, the evidence suggests that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but I have this book that says it's 6000 years old, so obviously god created the universe 6000 years ago but made it look like it's 13.7 billion years old to test our faith!"

xaratherus의 게시글

*sigh* xaratherus, for someone who argues for tolerance and understanding for the gay community, you're so entirely closed minded it's not funny.

In that case so are 99% of the people on the planet, Squishalot.

Do you really think that Young Earth Creationists would really be open to the claims of, say, Muslims, as to how the world was created? Or the Muslims to how the Hindi say it was created? Or the Hindi to how the Wiccans say it was created?

No, they aren't going to be. The YEC is going to point to the Bible and say, "This is why I know it happened that way," and the Muslim is going to say, "No, you're wrong - the Qur'an says this is what happened."

And in the case of the fundamentalists (and many moderates as well) of any of those particular religions, you could present them with 100% conclusive, indisputable evidence of how the world was created, and what would happen?

$10 says it wouldn't be, "Darn, you're right - I guess my holy book was wrong." Why do I feel confident in saying that? Because of apologetics. Faiths do not admit wrong; they instead rationalize and attempt to make faith fit fact.

Now, as to why I disagree that I'm closed-minded:

Any one of those faiths can, at any time, sit down with me and provide me compelling, credible, and unambiguous evidence as to why their particular creation hypothesis is the correct one. And the moment they do, they'll have a convert.

I won't hold my breath that it will happen, but I am open to the possibility that it could. But it's going to take far more than pointing at a book of their cultural stories to do it, because every single religion out there can do that exact same thing.

Until that day, I see no reason to think that a cigar is anything more than a cigar. And I don't see it as closed-minded to ask someone who tells me that the cigar is really a duck to show me some sort of credible evidence of their claim.

You're completely missing the point that I have no issues with the scientific reasoning behind carbon dating.

You're completely missing the point that I'm not trying to say that we can't extrapolate our carbon dating results due to some mysterious catalyst.

I'm saying that in the Biblical case:

a) God created Adam.
b) A scientist comes through 5 seconds later.
c) The scientist tests how old Adam is, and he appears to be a young healthy male of 25 (say), not 5 seconds old.

Likewise:

a) God created the Earth.
b) A scientist comes through 6000 years later.
c) The scientist tests how old the Earth is, and it appears to be a old healthy planet of 4.5billion (say), not 6000 years old.

My point is, God has (by Biblical account) created items that are scientifically demonstrated to be aged prior to creation (i.e. is created with the attributes of an aged object).

But now you're putting the cart before the horse, Squish.

I could say "Aldur created the Earth, and a scientist who comes through 12,000 years later tests how old the Earth is, and it appears to be a planet of 4.5 billion years, not 12,00 years," and the semantic value of the statement is the same. Replace "God" and "Adam" and the time frames in question with the appropriate names and values found in any other creation myth out there, and your hypothesis is semantically equal, it has the same meaning - and just as invalid.

Why do I say it's invalid? Because it introduces a complexity to the hypothesis - God, or Allah, or Vishnu, or whatever - without: A, proving that said being exists; or B, proving that the complexities are necessary in some way based on the phenomenon the hypothesis is trying to describe.

What brings the hypothesis into question even more is that millions of other people read the Bible and they don't believe it to say that at all. They accept that the planet really was created billions of years ago, and thus is billions of years old, and believe that the creation story in Genesis was only meant to be parable.

But since neither of them can prove what they claim conclusively, then which do I accept? I'll put it this way: It wouldn't be YEC. If I had to choose one, it would be the flavor of Christianity that didn't throw in the unnecessary wrinkle of, "The world only looks like it's billions of years old; it was really created last Tuesday."

While Occam's Razor is often proven to be invalid, complication without justification regularly proves itself to be a bad idea.

Why is it implausible that in the same account, the earth was also created as an aged object? If you build a house in The Sims, and you install a weatherworn roof, to the Sim living there, is the roof 5 seconds old, or is it aged and weatherworn?

The analogy is flawed because in it I am the definition of the critical variable. In your analogy, I'm God - not the Sim.

Unless the Sim has been taught by his family or society that the great Roof Builder sometimes causes old-looking roofs to pop into existing, then the rational assumption on the part of the Sim - assuming that it didn't witness the roof popping into existence - would be that the roof really is old, and it's old because it has been in existence that long.

Now, if the Sim later witnessed a doorway popping into existence before its eyes, and the doorway was also weatherworn, then it would have a rational reason to think there might be something odd with the roof.

Without that, the Sim could make up a story about how the roof is actually only a few seconds old, but was created at a weatherworn age, and that story might even be right - but is the Sim justified in expecting anyone else to believe it when it can't offer any evidence besides its story? Especially when millions of other Sims have conflicting stories as to where the roof came from? Or worse yet, when other Sims have the same basic story as the Sim owner of the roof, but they don't think it's a few seconds old, but really is weatherworn?

If God, or any other deity, created the universe, then of course it knows that it did so. But if a deity really did create the universe, then it did a really poor job of leaving behind any sort of universally-acceptable evidence that it did so. If and when it corrects that mistake, and throws us, say, a blueprint or a receipt from Divine Depot, then I'm ready to read it; until then, I don't see a reason to add overly-complex details to what evidence - observation and science - tells us.

Squishalot의 게시글

Bro. Reptiles move along the ground, not in the water. That's the reason they evolved scales to be able to keep their moisture inside of them, and leathery eggs that didn't have to stay in the water. Some reptiles, like Mosasaurs, Turtles, and Marine Iguanas, later returned to the water, but the very reason reptiles exist distinctly from amphibians is so they move along the ground instead of being confined to areas near large bodies of water.

Incidentally, the first birds evolved from reptiles about 70 million years after the first true mammals showed up, and roughly 360 million years after the first fish.

a) That doesn't change the fact that the era of amphibians / reptiles / birds can still be treated as one 'age'. Arguably, in Genesis 1:22, God says to "let the birds increase on the earth". Are you going to insist on defining that as meaning that the birds were landbound (e.g. ostrich)?

b) Not all mammals are land dwellers. I thought it was fairly clear that I was only really referring to land-dwelling mammals.

That being said, I believe that a minor point of order (literally) is not a make-or-break in the question of whether Genesis is reonciliable with what science tells us. Whether you're right or wrong in principle, what you're arguing does not disprove the overall events in Genesis.

Why else would he make everything look billions of years older than it actually is?

Again, I pose the Sims argument - why would you want anything you create to 'look' like anything?

If I sound like I'm repeating myself, it's because I am. Your question isn't a comprehensible response to my question.

Of course it's not, because I am not a creationist. I find creationism to be extremely unlikely, if just because forcing it to conform to the evidence we have now makes it sounds like a conspiracy theory. "Okay, the evidence suggests that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, but I have this book that says it's 6000 years old, so obviously god created the universe 6000 years ago but made it look like it's 13.7 billion years old to test our faith!"

Skree, I know your views on the matter. You don't need to try to explain it to me again. However, you can't ask:

So did God create the universe to look 13.7 billion years old to troll us, or did Satan make everything look older than it is to test your faith?

And respond with:

the book was written by desert nomads thousands of years ago who didn't understand physics and geology and biology as well as we do now.

It's not a valid option in the context of the question you're asking. So either your answer is illogical and invalid, or your question is nothing more than rhetoric and doesn't belong in a serious discussion.

And it's hardly a conspiracy theory. Arguably, the Big Bang theory is even moreso one - if the universe began when the Big Bang occurred (or in fact, if it's a never-ending cycle of expansion and collapses), what existed before it? If time and space are interrelated, did time exist prior to the Big Bang? Or even, at the instant of the Big Bang?

The concept that we have a universe that is expanding, yet we can't explain what it's expanding through is more of a conspiracy theory than the idea that God created an old world because he liked the look of it.

In that case so are 99% of the people on the planet, Squishalot.

That doesn't mean that we need to stoop to their level.

But now you're putting the cart before the horse, Squish.

I could say "Aldur created the Earth, and a scientist who comes through 12,000 years later tests how old the Earth is, and it appears to be a planet of 4.5 billion years, not 12,00 years," and the semantic value of the statement is the same. Replace "God" and "Adam" and the time frames in question with the appropriate names and values found in any other creation myth out there, and your hypothesis is semantically equal, it has the same meaning - and just as invalid.

Why do I say it's invalid? Because it introduces a complexity to the hypothesis - God, or Allah, or Vishnu, or whatever - without: A, proving that said being exists; or B, proving that the complexities are necessary in some way based on the phenomenon the hypothesis is trying to describe.

That's not a valid argument.

In the context of the YEC argument, God exists. You're trying to argue that their story is inconsistent with the measurements that scientists are taking, without taking it in the context of their story. The thing is, their argument is internally consistent - you can't take away a core assumption of their argument in order to claim that the evidence is inconsistent.

If that's what your entire basis for YEC bashing is, then the carbon dating point is a non-issue - your beef is that you don't believe that God exists, not that YECs don't believe in carbon dating. And in that respect, I maintain - you have no proof that God does not exist, and therefore, you can't prove that the world isn't 6000 years old. Q.E.D.

The analogy is flawed because in it I am the definition of the critical variable. In your analogy, I'm God - not the Sim.

Yes, that's the point. The builder is God, the Sims are Christians.

Without that, the Sim could make up a story about how the roof is actually only a few seconds old, but was created at a weatherworn age, and that story might even be right - but is the Sim justified in expecting anyone else to believe it when it can't offer any evidence besides its story? Especially when millions of other Sims have conflicting stories as to where the roof came from? Or worse yet, when other Sims have the same basic story as the Sim owner of the roof, but they don't think it's a few seconds old, but really is weatherworn?

Justified? Probably not. But is he right? In this example, yes. What you're describing is a perfect analogy of what the Christians believe - they saw all this happen, documented it, but the rest of the Sims in the neighbourhood don't believe it.

Ok, now I should probably get back to doing some work here at work...(##RESPBREAK##)8##DELIM##Squishalot##DELIM##

Atik의 게시글

Skreeran의 게시글

/sigh

I'm not a physicist, but I have read many book by physicists, and just because a layperson doesn't understand Big Bang theory doesn't make it a conspiracy theory. There's decades of math and powerful evidence behind it. Time began with the Big Bang. There is no before the Big Bang. That's like asking what's north of the North Pole. The universe is expanding, but it's not expanding through anything. It's simply that the finite amount of space that there is is getting bigger.

If you really want to know more, I highly recommend this. You might also try reading some Steven Hawking or Carl Sagan.

a) That doesn't change the fact that the era of amphibians / reptiles / birds can still be treated as one 'age'. Arguably, in Genesis 1:22, God says to "let the birds increase on the earth". Are you going to insist on defining that as meaning that the birds were landbound (e.g. ostrich)?

b) Not all mammals are land dwellers. I thought it was fairly clear that I was only really referring to land-dwelling mammals.As I explained, land mammals came into being 70 million years before birds. The days of creation are a fundamental part of the account of creation. Without them, you might as well say "In the beginning, God created everything" which would actually be more accurate than saying plants came before the sun, or that birds came before reptiles and mammals.

Again, I pose the Sims argument - why would you want anything you create to 'look' like anything?

If I sound like I'm repeating myself, it's because I am. Your question isn't a comprehensible response to my question.The universe appears, by all accounts, to be 13.7 billion years old. If it appears to be 13.7 billion years old and it is 13.7 billion years old, then the account of Genesis is clearly wrong. If the account of Genesis is correct, but the universe still appears to be 13.7 billion years old, rather than 6000 years old, then you have to account for why it looks much, much older than it actually is. Unless I completely misunderstood what you were saying, it seemed that you were suggesting that God created the universe 6000 years ago, but in a state that made it appear 13.7 million years old.

Either it truly is 13.7 billion years old, or it isn't. Either way, it appears to be. If God created the universe 6000 years ago but didn't make it look like it's 6000 years old, why did he do that if he wants us to believe it?