“No it isn’t” is not an argument. Care to try again?
They aren’t possible. Why do you think most labs won’t test samples unless you tell them where they came from and what dates you expect? They keep good dates and throw out anomalous readings.
https://thecreationclub.com/?s=RADIOMETRIC+DATING%3A+HOW+RELIABLE+IS+IT%3F
You make it sound as though mainstream scientists make up a clandestine coven of conspirators. Why is that an appealing idea?
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Consider sunlight striking 1 gram of water. The water evaporates and condenses again that night at a height 100 m above the original location. By the next day, the temperature of the system is identical to the original state, and the water is now 100 m higher. What is the change in entropy?
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Rejecting “evolutionary” theories in social sciences and humanities makes well-known sense and is fairly common, not just among atheists and agnostics. This may be a surprise to biologists who aren’t familiar with other fields. As it is, two former presidents of the International Sociological Association agree with how to “properly” reject evolutionary ideology, though for a biologist this might sound “impossible” or “unscientific”, the latter which comes across as idolatry.
It might not surprise a individual protestant at BioLogos, nevertheless those sociological thinkers were not drawing upon ECism or TEism via evangelicals in the USA. Those who insist we must all trust ECists or TEists, No Matter What, seem deluded by something. Is anyone willing to suggest by what those protestants are deluded? And if you believe these protestant thinkers are really not deluded, then why did YECism originate within protestantism in the first place? Far too much protesting from “protestants” against historical teaching has moved this question ahead in the queue.
Nope. Pretty much any child can see the similarities in most kinds. Even such different looking ones as saint bernards and chihuahuas. Why do you seem to take offense to that?
Appealing? Not quite. Historical? Yes. Ever read about what happened to the giant remains found, not only across America, but on pretty much all continents? Most dug up in America were sent to the Smithsonian and disappeared from there, along with most controversial objects from the past couple of centuries. OOPARTs are found on a regular basis, and just as quickly dismissed by the experts.
The ones I’ve seen reports on were faked or misidentified in the first place, so they did not ever exist. There is the real problem: the belief in dubious sources and people. False teachers and false prophets as warned against in the Bible. In reality, a scientist confirming something like this would achieve professional acclaim. As an example, look at Mary Schweitzer, whose finding fossilized soft tissue in dinosaurs thrust her into scientific prominence when otherwise she would have remained obscure.
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When you accuse scientists of faking data it is a tacit admission that the data, as presented, supports an old Earth.
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I can see the similarities between us and other apes.
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You have been given multiple observations of entropy decreasing in nature without a machine. Denial isn’t an argument either. Here is a list of those observations:
The Sun creates a temperature gradient between the equator and the poles on Earth. That is a reduction in entropy. (me)
The sun shining on a dark rock in a field of snow is another. – @glipsnort
Consider sunlight striking 1 gram of water. The water evaporates and condenses again that night at a height 100 m above the original location. By the next day, the temperature of the system is identical to the original state, and the water is now 100 m higher. What is the change in entropy? – @glipsnort
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I do believe in the spiritual forces of wickedness. But I believe that what is seen as demon possession is mostly an ancient understanding of epilepsy, etc.
What should you do if a person is having seizures? I think the person should be taken for medical evaluation and treatment with appropriate medicine. Ditto for mental illness. My opinions won’t be popular here, but so be it. I don’t know of any clearinghouse for licensed exorcists, do you? Neither do I see a fund to pay the legal costs of a person who brings their kid to an exorcist instead of a doctor.
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Sigh. That old chestnut again.
I don’t know if you realise it, but what these people are doing consists of two things:
- Taking perfectly reasonable procedures that are standard practice in every area of measurement, and twisting them and misrepresenting them to make them appear as if they’re cherry-picking and fudging when they’re not.
- A conspiracy theory so ludicrous and wide ranging as to be into the realms of science fiction.
First of all, knowing what date ranges to expect. Every form of measurement needs to start off with some kind of expectation about what kind of range to expect, simply so you know to use the right tool for the job. If I want to weigh myself, I will use a set of bathroom scales. If I want to weigh out the ingredients for a birthday cake, I will use a set of kitchen scales. If I want to weigh ten tons of sand on the back of a truck, I will use a weighbridge at a quarry. If I want to measure the size of my desk, I will use a tape measure. If I want to measure the distance from London to Aberdeen, I will use the odometer in my car, or a GPS device. If I want to measure the thickness of a metal rod, I will use a micrometer.
By YEC logic, that would constitute circular reasoning. By everyone else’s logic, you’re simply starting with a wide range of possibilities and narrowing it down to a much narrower range. That is not circular reasoning; it is iterative reasoning.
So what do YECs do? They take fresh rock samples, use dating techniques that are designed for rock samples hundreds of millions of years old, and when the results come out as only a few hundred thousand, claiming that means that all dating methods are completely broken right across the board.
It’s like using a weighbridge at a quarry to measure out the ingredients for your kid’s birthday cake, and then when the results come out all mushy and inedible, claiming that means that Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal, the Hairy Bikers, Mary Berry and Nigella Lawson are all so bad at cooking that they could be teaching us to make rat poison on their TV shows for all we know. I’m sorry, but measurement doesn’t work like that. Neither does anything else, for that matter.
Secondly, throwing “bad” dates away. That one is even more laughable. Have you any idea how much data they would have to be throwing out for that argument to have any validity? Somewhere in the region of ninety-nine percent of their data. Ninety. Nine. Percent.
Now let’s do a little bit of maths on that. Each published result costs in the region of $5,000-$10,000 to process – and that’s just for the analysis alone, before you even get to the fieldwork, storage, researchers’ salaries, and the like. This means that “evolutionists” must be squandering one milllion dollars per published result on wholescale scientific fraud. And when you consider that there are more than ten thousand radiometric results published in the scientific literature every year, you’re talking about ten billion dollars a year worldwide being squandered on basically making things up.
Where, then, are the accountants and auditors complaining about this colossal waste of money? Where are the scientists working in other fields, competing with it for funding, creating a stink because they have lost out on research grants because of it? Where are the documents blowing the gaff on it on Wikileaks? And where are the US Senators — some of whom are YECs themselves — calling for the obvious fix to the problem of requiring all radiometric studies to be pre-registered?
I’m sorry, but all that is just a conspiracy theory so far fetched and way out there that it makes the idea of NASA faking the moon landings sound plausible by comparison.
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Circular reasoning would be to use a non-standardized weight to calibrate your scales. They will all read the same, but they will all be wrong, and by the same degree.
So, almost 99% of dates thrown out would be ok with you? The number is about 80%. And that is the least of the problems.
Leakey’s Skull 1470 was initially dated at Cambridge Laboratory (England) with the potassium-argon method. The first date was 221 million years, but it was rejected because it didn’t fit the evolutionary scenario. Further testing produced dates from 2.4 to 2.6 million years. Leakey could accept that date since it was closer to his evolutionary teaching although he preferred a younger date. (Many millions of years difference in those dates and the first date!) After more tests they got another date of 1.8 million years from the University of California, Berkeley. Now, that’s more like it. That date fits their fairy tale! Isn’t it interesting how they can adjust their “science” to fit their philosophy? And did you notice that a bone finder can “shop around” at various testing agencies to get the date he wants? Leakey now accepts a date of about 2 million years.
Using that definition for evolution puts it on a death spiral, because it means the loss of usable information, which is the natural result of 99% of mutations. You never get more advanced creatures that way.
Maybe, but we aren’t related. Not even the same number of chromosomes. And the supposed tiny percentage of DNA that is different exploded when the Encode project proved that there is no ‘junk’ DNA. More than 70% of human DNA can’t be matched with ape DNA.
Kudos to those having the patience to take on a seemingly hopeless task. I used to be up for such debates, but I’ve lost the will.
I was an atheist scientist until my mid thirties. I always wonder how I was never invited to those meetings where we formed our master plan to throw away all that “good” data.
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You are claiming that strongly supported and established scientific theories that you don’t like are myths. At the same time, you are claiming that what everyone here knows are myths ( or at least allegorical tales) are science but with no evidence at all.
Patrick, you have it all backwards
You make these claims despite all the evidence against you. As you have said to me, saying something doesn’t make it so.
Learn to listen to people, and start being prepared to change your mind to suit the evidence against you.
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Yes but they don’t do that. They use SI units which are rigorously defined with a precision of eight or nine significant figures.
No it wouldn’t be OK with me. This is the problem with you YECs. You take something that we say, misunderstand it, and twist it to mean something that we never intended. And then when we point out that you’re quote mining us and misunderstanding us, you dismiss it as “weaselling” or something like that. I’m sorry, but that’s dishonest.
The figure of 99% is not what would be considered acceptable. It is what would be happening if your throwing things away conspiracy theory had any basis in reality.
As for your 80% figure, beside the fact that you need to explain where you are getting that figure from, that would not give the level of concordance that we see in radiometric results. It would give error bars in the region of ±20% or so at best. Real error bars in radiometric dating are typically around ±1% or so, and in fact high precision state-of-the-art radiometric results can be as tight as one part in five thousand.
As for the link you’ve given, once again, that is making the completely unjustified leap from “doesn’t always work” to “never works” and from “occasionally ambiguous” to “consistently out by a factor of a million.” You are blowing things completely out of all proportion.
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