Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
41
As you are mistaken, if not piously, blithely falsely humble, about the rational fact of abiogenesis and evolution operating on all infinite worlds supporting life from eternity Liam. There is no rational alternative at all. The probability of there being one is absolutely zero. It has nothing whatsoever to do with chance or arrogance. That would be ignorance. As in the premiss underlying this thread. Unknowingly wilful. Because fear.
There is nothing humble whatsoever in saying that using one’s God given rational faculty is arrogating God’s prerogative. Fear is the mind killer.
No expert here but what about the carbon dating of recognised human fossils over 6,000 yrs? This topic seems to be clutching at a small peice of controversial calculations related to genetics to prove the viability of YEC.
I just don’t get the need to defend YEC. it is not a matter of choice between YEC and atheist evolution, its not a binary choice for believers, as much of biologos seeks to show.
I have no problem with people pointing out where think I am mistaken - how else will learn? I would simply ask that next you do so without assigning motives.
If, in fact, my response did in fact come across as “piously, blithely falsely humble” then you have my sincere apology. That was not my intention.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
44
Good man Liam. So I’m not functionally claiming to divine omniscience then? Just closed-minded to bizarre, spurious ‘probabilities’ that are rationally, meaninglessly impossible. The laws of physics, the fundamental forces, QM, thermodynamics, are never, ever wrong. It’s meaningless. There is no even spuriously calculable ‘chance’. On up. The same for chemistry and biology. Abiogenesis and subsequent evolution. To say they could be wrong is not scientific. Or humble. They are no more wrong than gravity could be.
And yeah, I play very hard and expect no quarter in return. Faith must stand on rationality in this corner of the marketplace, not the chosen blinkers with fingers in the ears and la-la-la of the OP.
I’m being ruthless, pitiless here I know: the claim of humility is false, because behind it is something else. Something as adamantine as my rational 100% certainty. Or worse, there is actual doubt, about the rational fact of physicalism. We are in God’s image in that He - Love - is supremely rational. My rational certainty polarizes a certainty in you making you not humble, but outraged that someone would dare to be that arrogant.
I do think that most appeals unyielding certainty are in fact claims to functional omniscience (sorry!). I once would have said that I believed YEC was an indisputable, undeniable rational fact. Moreover, I was unwilling to concede the tiniest margin that I might be mistaken, or that evidence might one day appear that would convince me otherwise. Then, one day, such evidence (or pieces of evidence) appeared and in time I realised how wrong I was. To fall from such heights of certainty unshed in a period of painful repentance. It is not an experience I have any desire to repeat.
For gravity, etc, I’ll grant it is extremely unlikely, however, I still leave the door ajar for a possible discovery that revolutionises how we understand these things. As to Evolution and (the yet unsolved riddle of) abiogenesis I think the best we can really say as of now is “this is how evolution works on our planet”. The universe is a strange place that is full of surprises. Until we actually encounter a range life on other planets and examine where it came from, I don’t know how we can say otherwise.
You are welcome to disagree with the above, but at least you know the context behind the statements.
My original post was not directed to you, it was in response to Christy. If you feel offended by what I wrote I apologise. I can see how perhaps my first post might be taken as a veiled dig; that was also not my intention. I also never claimed to be humble myself (that would be self-contradictory), I directed that praise towards Dr. Schweitzer.
I hope that those clarifications can restore peace between us, or at least enable us to agree to disagree.
1 Like
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
46
Liam. The apology is mine. You are a thoroughly decent chap. And thanks to you and despite me, peace is assured.
I suggest they test these bones for carbon 14, to disprove once and for all that these bones are young. But they will never do that, I wonder why. Because people have actually found C14 in dinosaur bones, several times.
These bones still contain the original proteins and cell structures. It makes no sense to cling to the claim that they are 65 millions years old.
Sweitzer said herself during the interview : “but we KNOW these bones are 65 millions years old”. They have a model that they are not allowed to doubt and change, That’s not the scientific method.
Carbon dating doesn’t work beyond around 50K years or so (because in those ranges, the amount present becomes buried in noise and approaches limits of detectability.) So it would be a waste of a lot of money to run a carbon dating test on such a thing, and carbon dating is expensive. So your suggestion would be a bit like telling Nasa … Let’s plan a special space mission for astronauts to go into orbit with cameras so that they can once and for all just prove that the earth isn’t flat. There is a reason no such special trips get scheduled: Hint: It isn’t because Nasa is afraid that flat earthers might be right. In the same way, layers of geologic strata have been so well dated by so many other independently overlapping and confirmed methods of dating that there is no doubt any longer among the vast majority of scientists about the ages of such bones.
Adhering to well-established models is not a violation of the scientific method. It is, in fact, people paying attention to science.
The dating of the bones has used multiple other reliable ways of dating that do use the scientific method. It is a fact that paleontologists’ research questions do not revolve around dispelling YEC doubts. Why should they? None of the evidence they present convinces you anyway.
I used to think humans were a late creation within an old Earth history, then after noticing a few studies about mtDNA and other things, I started to notice the systematic concealment of “inconvenient” data. There is a model with millions of years to allow evolution (even tho time doesn’t solve the fundamental problem of information/complexity creation), and everything that doesn’t fit the model gets thrown out, and the data is often tortured to fit the model.
I am currently trying to learn genomics, the teacher talks about phylogeny trees, each leaf of the tree is a current specie. But despite having fossils spanning “billions” of years to the beginning of life, there isn’t a single fossil for the tree branches, no trunk, only leaves…
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
51
One way used to date these fossils is counting the thickness and number of sediment layers, assuming a uniform deposition. But no fossil can be preserved with a slow uniform deposition.
Another way is to use Uranium–lead dating, but it won’t tell you the age of the creatures, only the rocks, and it also relies on a whole lot of assumptions.
And the inconvenient data get ignored, for example the fact fossils can cross “million of years” worth of sediments, their tracks in the sand are preserved in layers “millions of years” before their body appear in the fossil record, no plant roots or bacterial life observed in layers that were supposedly deposited on the surface for over thousands of years, etc.
There are other ways old measurement also. Scientists are aware of factors that may cause spurious results, and are careful to take them into consideration, as their careers and livelihood depends on their findings withstanding scrutiny.
I might ask, what measurements support the alternative timeline you support? What is the evidence that dinosaur fossils are much younger? Anything you can measure and put a number on?
So how many doctorates and decades of research do you have? You’re someone who is coming in, reading sources and somehow you are a better judge of results than all of the scientists of THEIR OWN work.
Here’s a brief history of how we changed views on the age of the Earth:
The age of the Earth is NOT related to evolution.
So a better model is to squeeze billions of years of history into a few thousand years? Don’t you realize that the young Earth and global flood model is torturing data? Nobody can even agree where this massive flood deposit boundary actually is and just keep inventing ad hoc explanations for virtually everything.
Where are you learning about the fossil record from? This is incredibly wrong.
I’m aware of how geological dating methods work. I’m not at all convinced you understand them. I have friends who have PhDs in geology. None of them find the stuff you are bringing up confusing or inconvenient. There are explanatory frameworks for all those observations that fit with an ancient earth and a progressive fossil record. What’s more those explanatory frameworks are highly predictive. If you would spend some time reading science that has not been pre-digested for you by YEC apologists, you might be able to see that it is actually the YEC apologists who ignore and handwave away every piece of inconvenient evidence. That is why so many people here could not maintain those YEC views (myself included) once they started looking at the science.
What do you call “measurement” ?
Is there a direct measurement of the age of any fossil, apart from the recent ones dated with Carbon 14 (which needs a lot of calibration) ?
Fortunately Dr. Schweitzer kept saying the bones in which she found soft tissue are 65 millions years old, because if she said otherwise we would have never heard about it.
Apart from the numerous historical accounts of dinosaurs by the Chinese, the Romans, and the vast number of ancient art depicting dinosaurs, apart from the soft tissue which in itself is a direct proof of young age, there are indeed measurements available.
Carbon-14 Content of Fossil Carbon - Paul A. Giem 2001
Radiocarbon in Dinosaur and Other Fossils - Thomas, B. and V. Nelson 2015
Cretaceous dinosaur bone contains recent organic material and provides an environment conducive to microbial communities - Saitta, E. T. et al. 2019.
Carbon 14 was detected by numerous other scientists in coal and dinosaur bones. But despite rigorous methodology, they are mostly dismissed without a second look, because this data doesn’t “fit” the accepted dogma.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
58
That’s the second time you’ve done this: stated that scientists are committing fraud in their published findings, without providing any evidence for the accusation. I do hope you realize you’re committing slander here.
Radiocarbon dating has limits and error bars that are ignored by some, and contamination is a problem, as the paper you referenced ironically points out (actually, quite an interesting and good paper dIscussing soft tissues in fossils- thanks for sharing!). https://elifesciences.org/articles/46205