You’ll need to provide a link and highlight the salient points. Remember: what we are looking for is evidence that what was found was actual original unstable biomolecules and not their ultimately stable breakdown products.
Death by drowning in a catastrophic water event could have happened at any time in the Earth’s history, whether 4,500 years ago or 68 million years ago. It proves nothing.
Again, a secondary source, not a primary. The flow of blood statement of course was hyperbole, so guilty as charged on that. Again, intact red blood cells are quite different than artifactual remains of red blood cells. None of which takes away from the fact that it is indeed remarkable that she found these soft tissue artifacts. It is a big accomplishment. And actually helps bolster the study of the relationship of dinosaurs to modern birds.
Here is an article that discusses things pretty well, and while it too is not a primary resource, has links to original articles
Many dinosaurs coming off the ark went extinct because the post flood environment was likely not what they needed for survival. And others perished because they were a threat to humans and so were killed.
I’m open to the possibility of some survivors in New Guinea (pterosaur-like) and the Congo, huge swamp dwellers. People living in those areas describe seeing and interacting with these type of animals, so its worth looking. But what could so called “primitive” people know? Certainly not as much as a PhD paleontologist, huh? They just live there,
Complete none answer, as usual. The question is what was it about the post flood environment that was a problem. There are large dinosaurs, small dinosaurs, mid-sized dinosaurs, terrestrial dinosaurs, aquatic dinosaurs, vegetarian dinosaurs, carnivorous dinosaurs, and none are around today. The post flood environment could not have been detrimental to all of them, while other animals thrived.
But anyways, the post flood environment, according to YEC, suited the dinosaurs just fine. Remember, those carvings and references? Show us a living dinosaur.
I’m sorry Craig, but that is patently false. You would convince us that the earth is young if your arguments were strong enough.
Look, we don’t just idly dismiss your arguments as not strong enough here. We explain carefully why they aren’t as strong as you think they are. We explain to you what differentiates strong arguments from weak ones. We explain to you exactly what you need to do if you want to challenge a scientific theory, and we even give you examples of what would constitute strong arguments for a young earth. I addressed this particular claim here:
The fact of the matter is that if you want your arguments to be considered “strong enough,” then they need to consist of honest reporting and honest interpretation of accurate information. And if you want to persuade scientifically literate people that for more than a hundred and fifty years, the entire scientific community has been not just wrong but out by six orders of magnitude about the entire fundamentals of whole scientific disciplines, then misunderstood, misrepresented, ambiguous or nonexistent evidence, hand-waving, and tiny samples with huge error bars simply aren’t going to cut it.
LOL. Tail is a known Hebrew euphemism for penis. Even the ESV study Bible notes this.
That dating was performed with Ar-40. In which case, that is the difference between 99.7% of the expected amount being there (5,500,000 years as a result) and 100% being there (now as the result). That is within a plausible error bar.
Seeing as you could not be bothered to supply the reference, here is David Shormann’s original Creation Research paper: 40Ar/39Ar Calibration against Novarupta: No Good Reason to Believe in Millions of Years. The intended takeaway is in the title, which is generally enough for his audience. Your post is off by an order of magnitude, however: “the 100-year-old rhyolite from Novarupta still gave apparent ages as high as 5.50±0.11 million years old”, not 55 million.
The New Mexico Geochronology Research Laboratory which performed the measurement used for Shormann’s paper, has a page giving an overview of the assumptions, technique, and limitations of this dating procedure.. To be useful, any radiometric procedure has to be done on samples applicable to the measurement, and proper handling and preparation protocols must be followed. There are dozens of different techniques, and they all have their particularities and applicable age range, and some are inherently more accurate than others. They can all fail from mishandling or incompetence. This is nothing evasive or embarrassing. Just because you would not want me to do your triple bypass does not mean there are not competent people who can.
As you have had explained before, and studiously ignore; if you weigh a cup of flour on a truck scale, the flour would not even register. If you weigh a truck on a kitchen scale, so much the worse for the scale. That does not mean there is some conspiracy of chefs to deceive the public and promote atheism, that is just limitations of the instrument. Argon-40 has a half life of 1.25 billion years. That means that eruptions within the past few thousand years would be challenging or impossible to date, using an inappropriate scale.
Age measurements, properly done, have proved their value scientifically and commercially. Carbon dating is thoroughly tested, well understood, and from that alone we have incontrovertible evidence of continuous human history uninterrupted by any global flood over the past 60,000 years.
Pardon me while I point out the obvious: Egyptian mummies are found in tombs constructed by humans. Dinosaur bones are found in layers of rock.
Pardon me while I fall off my chair laughing. Sorry I couldn’t make it though half the thread before giving up. Y’all have at it.
Even the publicity coming from scientific publications has not been overly accurate with many of the “soft tissue” reports - like most journalism, too much hype and not enough checking the details. Some of the reported “soft tissue” has not held up under further work, such as the dinosaur “heart” that is just a concretion.
Note also that Mary Schweitzer is a former YEC. Having learned geology, she is now appalled at the misuse of her research by young earth advocates, as it brings Christianity into disrepute.
It is not clear whether Armitage actually had dinosaur bone versus something much more modern - it was not adequately documented.
The difficulty in trying to say what soft tissue could not be preserved for 65 million years is that many different things can happen around the globe. For example, if a dinosaur managed to fall into a hypersaline lagoon and get encased in salt, there might be unmineralized remnants of thoroughly dessicated muscle. Both the chances of it falling in and of the salt deposit surviving and being found seem quite low, but not completely impossible But the “soft tissue” that has been found associated with dinosaur remains is material that can last a very long time, and it poses no problem for an old earth. Neither old-earth journalists trying to make their headlines more tempting clickbait nor young earthers are being honest when claiming that the preservation is puzzling. The preservation is impressive and uncommon, but not overly surprising. Tough but flexible protein structures were well-documented from far older fossils long before the excitement over dinosaur material. What is impressive about Schweitzer’s work is developing the techniques for analysis.
More generally, this gets at the problem above: “One could admit that the science, as far as is currently known, does not favor a young earth, while hoping for progress on the topic in the future.” “There are some YEC that take this approach, particularly in geology. But they are not “hoping” to make progress. They are actively researching and believe they are making significant progress.”
No progress has been made in developing viable young-earth models in geology, because they are not researching geology. They are researching ways to persuade the public that science supports their position, rather than researching how the earth works. Again, progress will only occur if there is significant effort to eliminate bad arguments. The amount of time spent claiming that one is highly successful tends to have an inverse relationship with reality (see, e.g., Putin). For example, the RATE project was highly touted, but achieved nothing more than claiming that greatly speeding up radiometric decay could help to dodge a problem for young-earth claims, if you ignore problems like producing enough heat to melt the earth. Actual progress in young-earth geological explanations must be measured by whether they can give any useful information about the earth such as where to find natural resources or what fossils should be in what layers, not in whether they can keep fooling the public.
Exactly. @adamjedgar keeps bringing up the Flood, sediments, and dinosaurs, but he has never addressed any of the problems pointed out by Glenn Morton decades ago.
The whole essay is worth reading, but this is the kicker. Glenn had made a point to hire geologists from YEC colleges. Then he started calling them years later.
And where are the bones? (Not fossils)
And yet you spread exactly those bad wrguments by ignoring the context and written account of the Bible in order to support the interpretation of individuals who have those interpretations based on hypothesies that start with their is no God!
Those who follow a literal biblical account with their science interpretation do so because that written account they have in front of them is more than 2500 years of documented human history kthe book genealogies claim in excess of 4000 years)
And yet you spread exactly those bad wrguments by ignoring the context and written account of the Bible in order to support the interpretation of individuals who have those interpretations based on hypothesies that start with their is no God!"
This is incorrect on several points. Old-earth and evolutionary views do not start with the premise that God does not exist. On the contrary, most of the geologists who developed the modern understanding that the earth is quite old were Christians. The approach of workers such as Ussher, in seeking to create the best possible history of the earth by assembling all of the available data, led into modern old-earth geology as physical evidence was added to the written records. The modern young-earth movement is not a continuation of historical Christian views; this is a mistake based on the false dichotomy of young earth versus old earth. In reality, both young earth and old earth views fall into multiple categories. The old earth views based on assuming countless cycles (e.g., Hinduism, or many 18th-century deists) have no particular connection to modern geology, which reflects the geologic evidence for a long but finite and directional but humanly unpredictable history for the earth. Likewise, pre-1600’s young-earth views often put more emphasis on a figurative or symbolic interpretation of the days of creation than on any historical interpretation. Before the 1800’s, young-earth views often reflected “that’s all the good historical evidence we have, but if additional data come along, we’ll just add that in”, not the militant “nothing can possibly change my commitment to a young-earth position” attitude that functions as a legalistic false gospel in much of modern creation science. Thus, we see geologists of the 1800’s often appealing to the geological evidence for an old but finitely aged earth as evidence in favor of the Bible against deistic to atheistic cyclic models of history. Similarly, the first book to publish pictures reconstructing scenes from a series of geological ages concludes with a picture of Eden. Christians examined the accumulating evidence from geology, saw that it plainly pointed to a lengthy pre-human history, and figured that the additional time belonged somewhere before the creation of humans. This was not seen as a problem for the reliability of the Bible, and many early 19th-century geologists speculated that Noah’s Flood might be the most recent of the many apparently catastrophic events recorded in the geologic record. It was not until the mid-1800’s that it became clear that the geologic evidence for the most recent major geological changes better matched the effects of glaciers than of floods.
Nor am I the one who is ignoring context. The purpose of the Bible is theological, not scientific. The fact that Genesis 1 is talking about creation is no excuse to ignore that. Even the “historical” books are selecting incidents out of Israel’s history to illustrate theological principles, not aiming to teach us all about the historical statistics relating to the nation. That does not mean that the Bible is historically or scientifically inaccurate. But it is often imprecise when precision is irrelevant to its purpose. It omits many details that a historian or scientist would want to know; after all, we can research the evidence about those ourselves, but we can’t figure out essential information about God, salvation, etc. apart from His self-revelation. Rather than being a dry “just the facts” narrative, it makes extensive use of literary skill, including various figures of speech and symbols.
Likewise, we need to consider the original audience and their worldview. As John Walton has put it, the Bible was written for us, but not to us. We should not expect the Bible to have hidden clues to modern science. The science in the Bible is much more mundane - gravity worked the same then as now; it accurately reflects the geography, fauna, flora, etc. of the ancient Near East; and other everyday background information. There was little reason for ancient Hebrews (or, for that matter, even most modern humans) to be particularly concerned one way or another about the age of the earth, but all of us critically need to know that everything is a part of God’s creation. Thus, we should not fear or worship things such as the sun. Rather, we should appreciate and care for the world as God’s creation. Again, that contrasts with the many young-earth and ID advocates who promote bad anti-environmental arguments rather than sound stewardship.
“Those who follow a literal biblical account with their science interpretation do so because that written account they have in front of them is more than 2500 years of documented human history kthe book genealogies claim in excess of 4000 years)”
“Literal” requires careful definition, if it is to be used at all. Is it taking Psalm 98 literally to insist that rivers must actually have hands, and asserting that geographers are unbiblical if they deny it? That would be literalistic, but is definitely not a credible literary reading. Such extreme literalism is most typical of atheists making fun of the Bible. It is not a reasonable reading of the Bible. How do we recognize whether something is figurative or not? There are two main lines of evidence. One is context. The other is comparing to known external reality. But the modern young-earth reading of Genesis 1 insists that we cannot use external reality to help our understanding. Insisting that one’s interpretation must be inerrant is not the same thing as taking the Bible seriously, constantly seeking to improve our understanding.
The modern creation science approach is not following the biblical account with science interpretation, because it is not science interpretation at all. Rather, it is an attempt to justify a modernistic interpretation of the Bible as if it were modern science and not an ancient theological treatise by making up claims about science. But that approach does not follow the numerous biblical calls to honesty, to do work of good quality, to be faithful witnesses, etc. God does not want us to be PR agents for Him; He seeks people who will truthfully tell what we know and not pretend to know more.
Your lack of reasons would be a good indication.
But why would mummies represent the upper threshold of how well features can be preserved?
Of the fossils we do have, they all fit into the predicted nested hierarchy. This is why the fossil record is such a strong piece of evidence for the theory.
What features would a geologic formation need in order to contradict the YEC interpretation of the Old Testament?
If we have their fossils then they aren’t missing.
What features would a fossil need in order for you to accept it as being transitional between humans and a common ancestor shared with chimps?
Radiometric dating demonstrates otherwise.
You are ignoring the mountains of evidence that disproves the YEC view.
Why didn’t anybody tell me there was a game of Brockian Ultracricket? I could have been watching this instead of stupid football!
The consistency of radioactive decay is strongly supported. Radioactive decay is governed by the strong and weak nuclear forces, and any alteration of those forces tends to prevent atoms from existing. (Think of fine-tuning arguments about the need for the laws of nature to be exactly as they are.) We can see radioactive decay in distant supernovae following the same patterns as in labs on earth. From the basic laws of physics, we can predict approximately how stable or unstable a particular isotope should be. Of course, additional nuclear events and interactions can occur if you put things under extreme heat and pressure, and concentrating enough of certain radioactive elements makes it likely that stray bits from the decay of one will hit another and create an unstable condition (nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs, stars, etc.), but these produce noticeable effects on their surroundings and distinctive products. (One uranium mine in Gabon had isotope ratios matching nuclear reactor waste - the concentration of 235U two billion years ago was high enough for the rock to function as a natural reactor.)
Applying these to determining a date usually requires working out evidence on the original concentrations and measuring the modern concentrations. However, fission track dating actually counts the number of holes in a crystal produced by the decay of radioactive atoms.
Although carbon-14 dating is very useful, and supports the accuracy of the Bible against skeptical criticism, it is probably the messiest of radiometric dating techniques. Unlike the relatively straightforward behavior of isotopes in cooling magma or lava, carbon can go through all sorts of paths in earth’s surface environments. Thus, it is essential to consider where carbon comes from and whether there are potential sources of contamination. But life is carbon-based, and carbon dating is useful for most of archaeology and late Ice Age material, so there’s a huge amount of stuff of interest to study that can give a carbon date. Once you get past about 20,000 to 70,000 years (depending on just how clean you can keep your sample and how good the equipment is), there’s too little carbon-14 left to be distinguishable from background contamination from the air, you, etc.
A post was merged into an existing topic: Job and Dinosaurs
Will try to split the Job discussion out to a new topic, Job and Dinos, so if you are missing a post here, look for it there. As it is likely there is a little mixing of the topics, my apologies.
Can you put numbers on all the probabilities involved with error bars please.
Get you church to help perhaps.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.