Poe’s law from Wikipedia
Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture stating that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views such that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
This is an argument from incredulity. In my move from YEC to EC, I quickly learned that scientific facts are not beholden to my lack of imagination. Neither is a lack of imagination an adequate counter to the discoveries of someone who is an expert in their field.
A while a go I mentioned that, in my experience YEC/ID proponents who come the the forum are not interested in evidence. To this it was insinuated that I had ‘issues’ with Creationists. Yet, in the quote above, if one replaces ‘old’ for ‘young’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’, i believe it more accurately describes your interactions here on the forum than the work of Dr. Schweitzer or the posts of those who have responded to you. It is, I would suggest, you who is being driven by assumptions. Or, at very least, no less than anyone else.
Have you conducted a million year experiment to verify your findings? At most Dr. Schweitzer did a couple year experiment and she readily extrapolates it out to millions of years. Are you seriously telling me this is good science?
I would like to know what she thought he got wrong. She assumes an old earth where these are supposedly many millions of years old.
I am not saying she cannot put forward a theory how these could be old, but given the supposed age I would hope she would have significant humility about it. This is definitely not a “hard” science and conclusions that this is evidence for a young earth are very reasonable.
Automatically, discounting this as evidence for a young earth shows the scientific community is biased in their perspective and unyielding in the notion of an old earth.
As a Creationist, I don’t think she intends to “disprove God” and I have only minor concerns about her science - the chief being that she got the science wrong.
There has never been an observation of a failure of QM. There are no anomalies. It works as predicted, in theory, by pure mathematics. Every time. HUP can be expressed as a partial second order differential equation even I could follow. Reason and mathematics PRECEED science, hence my ‘before that’, after ‘Pure science’. And I’m right, she’s not wrong, is she. Well she is, about the possibility of being wrong. I’m surprised at you @glipsnort. How many sigmas till Ken Ham is right?
True.
False. To date, QM has provided an accurate model for empirical observations. It is not a mathematical truth that it will provide an accurate model for all future observations. Newtonian physics provided a universally accurate model for observations until it didn’t.
So what? I can write down an endless numbers of second order partial differential equations that don’t describe reality. Math can’t tell you which ones are accurate descriptions of reality.
All the reason and math in the world won’t tell you whether Newtonian or quantum physics provides a better description of the world.
Firstly, I have no findings since I am not a scientist. Secondly, no one can conduct a million year long experiment to either confirm or deny the findings. Therefore the objection is irrelevant.
Besides, one does not need to conduct an experiment lasting millions of years since the Lord has created an orderly universe and given us knowledge and senses through which we can make reliable predictions about the past. To say that we cannot has more in common with humean skepticism than Christianity.
I do believe this is an example of poisoning the well. If you are interested in finding out how Dr. Schweitzer tested the materials and for how long the I am sure that (perhaps, at a small cost) you could find out. You could then raise a concern I am sure there are folks here who could discuss them with you.
Thoroughly mineralising tissue takes a while, and usually millions of years. There are some extremely rare conditions under which it can take a few tens of thousands.
The only assumptions you need are: earth exists, and God is not a liar. Those are all the assumptions needed for radiometric dating to give precise answers.
If you ignore all the other evidence (like radiometric dating, stratigraphy, organism life spans, clear fossil transitions, etc.) that puts the Earth being 6000 years old in the “yes, it could be the case, but we can ignore the incredibly low probability” category.
Yes, because she did do a multi-million year experiment, the same way every other research paleontologist does. If something potentially points to a young earth, honest scientists look for possible explanations of how it could fit with the empirically tested, observed age of the remains, rather than concluding that every other honest geologist for the past 250 years has been completely wrong.
If it were only a few thousand years old, it would have non-mineralized tissue and a sequencable, fairly complete genome. We have plenty of fairly complete, sequenced genomes from 5,000 year-old mummified remains. None of the dinosaur bones contain preserved cells, they contain impressions of cells. They contain mineralized collagen, which (when not mineralized) is about as soft as fingernails (“soft” just means “not bone”). We have found dinosaurs with badly degraded pieces of “we can tell this was DNA”, not sequencable genomes.
That’s what it says. Noah is commanded to bring them in. Do you have other ideas?
Friend,
Scientists are human and they have biases. You are absolutely right. But evidence must also be interpreted in light of other evidence. If I have 10 pieces of evidence and 9 of those pieces point to a certain conclusion and 1 piece points to the opposite conclusion, I should probably reconsider the 1 in light of the 9, not the 9 in light of the 1.
My point being: you cannot simply use a piece of evidence here and there to overturn all the other evidence. Instead, you need to review that evidence and make sense of how it fits with the other pieces.
-Joshua W.
Hey, that fits right in with your YEC chronology! What a wonderful coincidence.
How is that a counterargument?
It does not refute this:
Actually there are many of her papers that are freely available. Here are a few including the paper quoted in the YEC video mentioned in another thread.
.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mary-Schweitzer/publication/7944782_Soft-Tissue_Vessels_and_Cellular_Preservation_in_Tyrannosaurus_rex/links/0912f50b8a8fb3c9d3000000/Soft-Tissue-Vessels-and-Cellular-Preservation-in-Tyrannosaurus-rex.pdf
It appears she just accepts the radiometric dating of fossils. @SixDays you will need to explain why those dates are incorrect.
New evidence always supports the antiquity of the earth and cosmos. This is by a Christian and it has one of my favorite words 
:
This isn’t ‘new’ evidence, but it certainly illustrates YECs’ poor understanding of the existence of radionuclides and their decay – this is not about radiometric dating of artifacts or rocks, but extinct radioactive atoms:
“Radioactive Atoms — Evidence about the Age of the Earth” Ken Wolgemuth
Well, well, look at who is embracing or at least discussing Your Inner Fish: Iran! And if they can do it,…
(from the facebook post by Neil Shubin)
Probably the same wrong things that appeared in this very thread. For example:
Schweitzer’s research showed that some nucleotides were trapped in the mineralized fossil (much as a spider can be embedded in amber for 100M years). Likewise cellular proteins.
But her research findings are not compatible with the assertion that “DNA and cells are still in existence.”
Now it could be that the author of the thread post about “DNA and cells” completely understood Schweitzer’s research and was simply being ambiguous. But the author of the thread post has had plenty of opportunity to clarify, and has not attempted to do so.
Best,
Chris
This is what soft tissue looks like after six thousand years:
Complete carcasses. Masses and masses and masses of fully sequenceable DNA. If the Earth really were six thousand years old, we would expect to find T-Rex carcasses in at least as good a state of preservation as that all over the place. We have never found so much as one that comes even remotely close.
There’s something you need to realise here. The age of the Earth is not “supposed” and it is not “assumed”; it is measured. It is measured on the basis of processes whose rates have been measured and whose initial conditions have been measured. The extent to which these rates and initial conditions could have varied in the past has also been measured. And I’m sorry, but there are ways in which these conditions can be measured that do not require you to have “been there,” and that do not require you to make blind assumptions of “uniformitarianism.”
And I’m sorry, but measurement is a “hard” science. It has strict rules, principles and standards that must be adhered to. Rules, principles and standards that have nothing whatsoever to do with “naturalism” or “secularism” or “uniformitarianism” or any other weasel word ending in “ism” that you may try to throw at them. And it is not reasonable to claim that anything is evidence for a young earth unless it sticks to those rules, principles and standards.
Would you like me to explain what those rules, principles and standards are?
While Young Earth Creationists celebrate Mary Schweitzer’s pioneering discovery of trace soft tissue in the permineralized fossil bones of a T. Rex, they then double back to infer that she does not possess the mental faculty to realize the implications of her own work. She’s the one who made the discovery, and her insight is worth more than that of arm chair quarterbacks whose job is to crank out YEC articles. For her part, Schweitzer responds, one thing that does bother me, though, is that young earth creationists take my research and use it for their own message, and I think they are misleading people about it.
First, the amount of material Schweitzer found is miniscule, visible only under very powerful microscopes. Which raises a question…if this demonstrates that dinosaurs are actually young, why is dinosaur tissue not plentiful? We have intact wooly mammoth carcasses, but none of the dinosaurs even though by the fossil record we know they also lived in overlapped regions, notably Alaska and Siberia. There exist largely intact specimens of saber tooth cats, wooly rhino’s, coyotes, camels, llama’s, Sloths, mastodons, bears, caribou, horses, wolves, bison, birds, humans and more, all thousands of years old, from permafrost, caves, tar pits, and bogs. Yet, though tens of thousands of dinosaur fossils have been found, not even one solitary specimen has ever been uncovered with macroscopic amounts of flesh and hide. If dinosaurs roamed the Earth at any time over the past five thousand years, we would have much better preserved remains of at least some in our possession. This lack of soft tissue is evidence of millions of years.
I did not say there was no degradation of the DNA but the fact is that it exists, branching blood vessels exist, red blood cells exist, as well as delicate cell structure which suggests it is much younger than millions of years. This is not uncommon to find in dinosaurs bones and your insistence that it is old is based on your initial assumption that it is old.
Yes we do celebrate it because it is evidence of a young earth. Even Schweitzer couldn’t believe it when she initially found it and she had her research team redo the testing over and over again! If you would watch the video, you would see her disbelief in both her voice and expressions seen on her face. Now she is so convinced of an old earth that she automatically jumped to the conclusion that the branching blood vessels, red blood cells, DNA structures and delicate cellular structures are all able to survive millions of years. Creationists look at this and go “Wait a minute here! Are you really saying that this is millions of years?” Now she claims she is open minded about this but her reaction is anything but open-minded. She accuses creationists of misleading people about it when the find is extraordinary.
First, the amount of material Schweitzer found is miniscule, visible only under very powerful microscopes. Which raises a question…if this demonstrates that dinosaurs are actually young, why is dinosaur tissue not plentiful?
I would say that the alluvial sorting was hard on certain layers with extreme temperatures and pressure. The powerful hot water flows probably ripped the skin and tissue off. The KT layer shows the residue of the meteor that hit the earth causing the great flood and the rapid deposition of massive layers of sediments like what happened at Mount St Helens. Some of the animals after the flood probably had much better preserved tissue, where most the dinosaurs seen in the fossil record are leftover from the flood.
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