Musings on YEC chronology

Faith & Science Conversation
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You are absolutely correct, it is a fossil of a fish.

But you are absolutely beyond what you can prove when you state that this occurred at a certain date and under a certain amount of pressure.

As for your “Smoking Gun of Evidence of an Ancient Earth: GPS Data Confirms Radiometric Dating”? Who measured the original radiation levels of the Earth and who tracked the movement of the plates upon which our Continents were moving.

Note, the longer a fault line does not move the more pressure it will take to break this open and cause it to move. So a continuously moving plate will not produce a monstrous earth quake, because what causes such huge earth quakes are the fault lines breaking open, not the actual movement.

Ever see one of those after image maps showing what our primordial universe looked like, all clumped together? Every seen one of those maps produced by atheist astronomers that shows our universe before it was spread out? Why can we see this. How did we get far ahead of this image as to look back on it. Isn’t the only simple answer an answer that seems impossible, namely the idea that our universe was expanding faster than light at some point in time? Which would only require a force that is far beyond what we can physically observe.

Nothing you can list actually proves an ancient Earth, nothing.

Because it is all based upon your conjectures which basically leave out God and then say, what we see has been going on at the same rates forever. In fact Global Climate Disruption is based upon the idea that since things are changing, unpredictably, despite eons of relatively stable change that it must be man made. Likewise you blame the conjectural massive increase in biological defects to pollution because if these are mapped back at their current rates it ruins all of your models so this must also be due to man made causes.

To close let me just ask this; How many times has humanity explained its was around contradictory data by mapping out unproven theories on how it might have happened?

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First and foremost, there was a witness, namely God, but by denying God you feel free to deny his testimony.

Second, there was a real life murder with no witnesses. Outside a broken liquor bottle had fingerprints, there were more fingerprints on bullets found outside too. Inside were an adulterous woman and her lover, shot to death. While the defendant had the motive too as this was his wife and her lower who were dead. - This case is mentioned in the Shawshank Redemption.
All the evidence you list, all against an innocent man who did not kill anyone!

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I’m sorry, Dominic, but I don’t think that you’ve understood what cross-checks are, how they work, or what they signify. It’s very elementary mathematical concepts that have nothing whatsoever to do with “atheism.”

Your scenario of monstrous earthquakes that move the continents by thousands of miles in a matter of days or weeks would not produce the consistent increase of radiometric ages with distance. In order to get to such a scenario, you would also have to accelerate nuclear decay rates at the same time. By a factor of a billion.

And I’m sorry, but that’s just science fiction.

You don’t have to be an “atheist” to see this. The young-earth RATE project team themselves admitted that accelerating nuclear decay rates by that much would have raised the Earth’s temperature to 22,000°C. That is four times hotter than the surface of the sun, and hot enough to vaporise the Earth’s crust many times over.

Even if you could get past the heat problem and accelerate nuclear decay rates by that amount, you would also have to do so in complete lock-step with the increased rates of continental drift. And I’m sorry, but once again, that is even more fantastical. Even if there were some mechanism that could couple billion-fold accelerated nuclear decay to billion-fold accelerated plate tectonics, the relationship would not be a linear one, and it would have a time-lag between the two. This would lead to a graph that wasn’t even remotely straight, and it certainly wouldn’t have a gradient at any point that came anywhere close to direct present-day measurements from GPS readings.

There’s nothing “atheistic” whatsoever about this. You don’t have to have “measured the original radiation levels of the Earth and tracked the movement of the plates upon which our Continents were moving” in order to see this. You don’t have to “basically leave out God and then say, what we see has been going on at the same rates forever.” Even allowing for the possibility of miracles, you still need to propose scenarios that descend into absurdity in order to squeeze 4.5 billion years’ worth of evidence into six thousand. And it’s nothing whatsoever to do with “conjecture.” As I said, it’s just measurement, and measurement is the exact opposite of conjecture.

Once again, you’re making unfounded and false accusations of “atheism” against anything and everything about science that you don’t like. I think you’ve already been told that this is slanderous and a violation of the rules of gracious dialogue on this forum. Please don’t do it.

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First and foremost you exaggerate my claim why?
If you really are confident in your conjectures why do you exaggerate my claims?

You say “monstrous earthquakes” even after I explain why a constant movement would not create a real earth quake, only minor tremblings. While the most monstrous earth quake ever recorded is hardly even felt if you are out in the open and is certainly not a danger to anyone!

The stories about Atlantis and how the sea boiled at the mouth of the Mediterranean in ancient Greek writings would both be explained by this possibility, that God sundered the continents and then moved them thousands of miles in a few hundred years of constant, close to continuous movement which slowly fell off but is still present today.

As for my not understanding? How do you calibrate your radiometric readings? According to what is going on now, just another example of what I have repeatedly cited, or according to your guesswork concerning the age of the world.

Measuring is the exact opposite of conjecture when it comes to currently observable rates, but when you start measuring things that happened before anyone was doing any real measurements, then it becomes conjecture and nothing more.

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It’s not about what you are claiming, Dominic. It is about what would be required in order to squeeze what we see in nature into a young earth timescale.

No, Dominic. According to cross-checks.

Cross-checks, Dominic. Cross-checks. Cross-checks are a confirmation of which historic rates were constant and which were not.

Do you or do you not understand what cross-checks are and how they work?

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Let’s look at the assumptions you are using.

  1. The boiling point of water was the same in the past.
  2. The rate of heat transfer from rock to water was the same in the past.
  3. The density of water and rock was the same in the past so that water stayed above rock.

I could find more. You are assuming that many measurements made to day were the same in the past. Why are you allowed to do it, but we are not allowed to do the same with things like radioactive decay?

Depends on the method. With K/Ar dating you can use the isochron method (Ar/Ar) to calibrate for background argon contamination. Rb/Sr dating is calibrated to known isotopic ratios and is able to determine how much Sr the rock started with. U/Pb dating uses two isotopes and decay chains to cross check one another (i.e. concordia/discordia dating). More to the point, there are multiple different isotope pairs and decay chains that can be cross checked against each other. For example:

Yet another cross check, which was alluded to earlier, is the Hawaiian islands and Emperor seamounts. These formed as the Pacific plate slowly moved over a mantle plume, leaving a string of islands in its wake. We can measure the age of each island and its distance to the modern position of the hotspot, which is Mt. Kilauea.

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When we take the slope of distance over time we get 8.6 cm/yr. That’s almost the same as the currently measured speed of the Pacific plate. This isn’t a coincidence. We get the correct numbers because the Earth is old and radiometric dating works.

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You asserted that, but I don’t remember you giving a reasonable explanation. I suppose you are referring to the story of the plates gliding over water layers, but where is your evidence that that occurred or the modeling that it could have taken place? The pressure and heat of a crustal plate miles thick moving slowly over another is enormous, and the friction literally melts rock. Any examples of fast moving friction free crustal plates slip sliding away ( apologies to Paul Simon)?

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Except the friction from sliding the continents would generate enough heat to melt the continents. Oh wait, no problem, God just makes the movement frictionless. Once you start to violate physical laws it gets hard to stop. Why not just say it is a miracle for which there is no evidence remaining? Why try so hard to come up with a natural explanation?

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69

First is last this time.

All of your cross checks are based on observed data, namely observed changes.

Now let me quote you:
“It is about what would be required in order to squeeze what we see in nature into a young earth timescale.”
This does have everything to do with what I am claiming and what you are claiming too.

Namely whether there is a creator who is in effect bigger and more powerful than our entire universe.

Will you never see the fact that, I do not have to squeeze it into observable phenomena if I just recognize Genesis 1 verse 1:
“In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
For I recognize that the observed is not the limit of reality.

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That’s pretty much the definition of empirical evidence.

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I really respect your passion and sincerity. Once upon a time I would have stood shoulder to shoulder with you and defending this kind of reasoning. However as others have pointed out on this forum, appeals to the miraculous to make evidence for an ancient universe fit YEC timelines is itself evidence for an ancient universe.

God is a God of order and truth. If the universe was indeed only 6k years old, why would he need us to make miraculous arguments to defend it? It would be obvious to everyone. One would simply need fire up the ol’ radiometric dating device, use it on a ‘supposed’ million year old fossil, and go “please tell what is stated on the readout?” And the discussion would be over.

But it doesn’t work like that, does it…

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Will you never see the fact that accepting the fact that the earth is billions of years old does NOT mean rejecting Genesis 1 verse 1?

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