The Fall of Historical Adam, (Federal Head of man), impacts all of humanity to need Christ's Salvation

Faith & Science Conversation
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My biggest problem with a global flood is that Genesis doesn’t say it was global – in context, it says it covered the known world.

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If @Burrawang wants to consider himself a scientist rather than a technician then that’s fine by me. But it does mean that he will need to meet higher standards in terms of getting his facts straight if he wants anyone to assume good faith on his part.

In any case, I would expect technicians as well as scientists to have a solid understanding of what error bars are, how they work, what they signify, and what you can and can not legitimately claim about them. That’s beginner stuff. Measurement 101. The kind of thing you learn in secondary school.

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Yes. @Burrawang, greetings. How is the weather Down Under (assuming you’re in Australia?) I’m in snowy (though thawing, hopefully for only a short time) Michigan currently, but grew up in West Africa, a missionary kid. I was privileged to be a minority US citizen with a larger number of Aussies, Kiwis, Brits, and Canadians, and enjoyed the environment very much.

In discussing things, would you consider citing your sources? Thank you.

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Your question relies on a premise whose correctness has never been shown: biological systems exhibit ‘complex specified information’. The concept of complex specified information was introduced by Dembski, who defined it as information that fit some independently specified description (‘specified’) and that was highly improbable. (If you’ve been studying this subject for decades, you presumably already know this.) There are problems with both parts of the definition. No one has offered any objective way of determining whether a system is actually specified or not, just subjective intuitions. More importantly, no one has can possibly determine whether a system was unlikely to arise under evolution – we just don’t know enough to do the calculation. All Dembski offered was a calculation of the probability that the bacterial flagellum randomly assembled itself, a number that is so irrelevant that it’s baffling that he bothered writing it up.

Leaving that aside… Scientific model-building works in steps, so let’s take this one step at a time. Are different species the result of descent from common ancestors? What does genetics tell us about that? Once we’ve answered that question, we can consider models that are consistent with the answer.

My answer is that genetics overwhelmingly shows that species, including very different species, share common ancestors. I’ve written up one piece of the genetic data here. What do you think of this evidence? What models that don’t include common descent would predict the observed patterns?

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The problem is that pristine-condition fossils are “rare”–compared to the total number of organisms which might be fossilized, let alone ones that actually preserve things that require rapid burial. Another problem is that the order of fossils is very precisely defined (index fossils, like Chesapecten madisonius only being found in a specific set of layers) and is somewhat random–it’s not sorted by size, depth or altitude range, or mobility.

Blood cell remnants, DNA fragment remnants, collagen is about as tough as fingernails; and the bone is mineralized, given that finding most of the soft tissue features requires soaking in a demineralizing solution for a while.

Exactly where they are expected to be–I’ve found a dozen or so transitional forms between pairs of species myself.

Contamination.

It’s called “rigor mortis”, which has nothing to do with drowning.

What are Tiktaalik, Busycon auroraense, gorgonopsids, and myllokunmingiids (to name a very few) if not transitional?

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I’m honestly not interested in this discussion if you want me to teach you basic science. Which is what I accept as fact. Anyone can check out a book or spend some time with Google and read up on the facts of earth history. It isn’t a secret knowledge you need to be chatechized into.

You can see the fossil record however you want, and I won’t try to convince you otherwise. But it’s kind of laughable to think that you being unconvinced of scientific facts disrupts my mental equilibrium to the point that I need to now go and “back up” my knowledge with evidence. I don’t need to do that. I’m fine. You are the one coming to a forum with questions.

Not every assertion needs a Bible verse to make it true. Evolution is true because it makes sense of empirical evidence. We know the earth is not merely 6,000 years old because we can measure the earth’s age. Your interpretation of some Bible verses doesn’t change the measurement. I believe Jesus is the author of life because that is a Christian faith claim, based on revelation and the witness of the church throughout history. The issue is integrating facts about reality with Christian faith claims, not pretending Christian faith claims are the only facts about reality we can know.

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Fine, here’s a 600+ post thread on the topic.

I don’t know, your interactions here are pretty sea-lion-ish. We started with federal headship and bounced to fossils and then the usefulness of the evolutionary model to science, then somehow the global flood. I find it hard to believe you have honest questions about these things, I think maybe you just like arguing and watching people spin their wheels.

What is Sealioning?: A Type of Trolling | Merriam-Webster.

“God bless.”

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I suspect most people see evolution as anti-God or an alternative to God. Not just young-earth creationists. So on a simple level, that is what evolution is because that is how it functions in society. All Christians should take that into consideration when discussing evolution.

The person is correct that evolution “is the major anti-God pretension of our age” but they are incorrect on how to address it since evolution is the most plausible theory by miles as well. Sadly, Newton is probably responsible for a lot of this misunderstanding.

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Not sure that the head thrown back is due to drowning, but certainly agree that many if not the majority of animals we find fossils of did drown. Only a very small percentage of a population is seen in the fossil record, as the vast majority of animals who die in exposed areas are eaten or otherwise decomposed by biologic means. Pretty much the only ones that get the opportunity to be fossilized are buried in floods, mudslides, and such, or sink to anoxic depths. This fairly rapid burial is necessary to preserve the bones long enough to be fossilized. It is estimated a total of 1.7 billion T. rex individuals lived over time before they went extinct, and we have about 40 of their skeletons that have been found, to give a little perspective on that. 1.7 billion Tyrannosaurus rexes walked the Earth before going extinct, new study estimates | Live Science.

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That’s a great way to respond to that question. The question is actually based on a faulty understanding of inspiration, which you indirectly address here:

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I wonder if I can read that whole thing today. :thinking:

I have to wonder if that can be unintentional. A lot of the sort of questions being posed here are what are used rhetorically to make points with people already inclined to support the position they derive from rather than being actual questions. When someone has ‘marinated’ in that sort of environment – which is common among YEC groups – they seem to tend to lose the ability to actually ask questions because they’re accustomed to using questions as “gotcha” statements. What results is a classic case of two sides/people taking past each other, one side using questions as statements while the other thinks they are actually questions to be answered – and thus neither side really understands what the other is doing.

BTW, I get a kick out of the “sealioning” term due to some interactions with actual sea lions, for example once when I was canoeing on a local bay; a sea lion bumped into my canoe, jolting me, so I turned to paddle and put some distance between us, only to have the same sea lion swim to bump into my canoe again in the very same spot. This went on for seven or eight bumps before I managed to paddle into a shoal that was too shallow for the annoying beast.
Oddly when I related this to a wildlife official she told me that sea lions don’t so such things, that they don’t bother people in boats. What made that memorable was that there were a bunch of fishermen present who regularly venture into that bay in small boats – and several of them laughed at her and said they’d experienced the same thing. We wondered if it was just the same oddball sea lion or maybe a behavior only found among those in that specific bay; I ended up suggesting to the wildlife gal that she venture into the bay in her own small boat to see if it happened to her, along with surveying local fishermen to see how commonly this was experienced – I figured it would make an interesting bit of research that could result in a paper in a science journal.
At any rate, the term “sealioning” resonates with me and that annoying individual one!

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Thinking back, I find it interesting that a greater portion of students than of professors saw it that way when I was a university student. Two atheist biology professors I had classes from made a point of noting in class that thinking evolution was anti-God was not scientific thinking, and others were known to say the same though not making a point of it in class.

Yeah, they’re just louder about it.

I’m not seeing that connection.

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Geophysicist Dr John Baumgardner, part of the RATE research group,*6 investigated 14C in a number of diamonds.*7 There should be no 14C at all if they really were over a billion years old, yet the radiocarbon lab reported that there was over 10 times the detection limit. Thus they had a radiocarbon ‘age’ far less than a million years! Dr Baumgardner repeated this with six more alluvial diamonds from Namibia, and these had even more radiocarbon.

The presence of radiocarbon in these diamonds where there should be none is thus sparkling evidence for a ‘young’ world, as the Bible records.

Ref:

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When Adam rebelled against God in the Garden of Eden, the whole of creation was affected and death came into the world for the first time.From that point onward, all living things including man had a short temporal existence on Earth that culminated in death. I suspect that Adam started dying from that point in history, but as his genetics would have been near perfect it took him a long time to finally expire as did people that are listed in the Bible before the genetic population bottleneck of the global flood.

The word ‘perfect’ isn’t used but I would venture to say that when the Creator states that what He had made was ‘very good’ it would be perfect.
Genesis 1:31
31 And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

I disagree, and in your own words, if Jesus believed Genesis to be ‘authoritative’ then don’t you think that He would have known it was accurate, after all He is the Creator, He was there! He fashioned Adam from the dust and Eve from Adams rib.

That maybe so, but I am certain that many orders of magnitude greater numbers of people were turned away from belief in the gospel and salvation because they wrongly believed that evolution explains origins and so the Bible in their minds must be wrong about creation as recorded in Genesis, thus they are lost sheep. This is evidenced by the rapidly declining numbers in congregations around the world. When many were asked why they left the Church, a common reply was that science - evolution had made belief in the Bible unnecessary hence they left the faith. The lie of evolution had done its deceptive work.

Because for as many that are saved there are many orders of magnitude more people who are deceived and lost to the faith forever from knowing our Lord and Saviour Jesus and the salvation that His love has given us all.

God Bless,
j

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I suggest you read:

God Bless,
jon

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Objections (technical) and answers

1. The 14C readings in the diamonds are the result of background radiation in the detector. This shows that the objector doesn’t even understand the method. AMS doesn’t measure radiation but counts atoms. It was the obsolete scintillation method that counted only decaying atoms, so was far less sensitive. In any case, the mean of the 14C/C ratios in Dr Baumgardner’s diamonds was close to 0.12±0.01 pMC, well above that of the lab’s background of purified natural gas (0.08 pMC).1
2. The 14C was produced by U-fission (actually it’s cluster decay of radium isotopes that are in the uranium decay chain). This was an excuse proposed for 14C in coal, also analysed in Dr Baumgardner’s paper, but not possible for diamonds. But to explain the observed 14C, then the coal would have to contain 99% uranium, so colloquial parlance would term the sample ‘uranium’ rather than ‘coal’.2
3. The 14C was produced by neutron capture by 14N impurities in the diamonds. But this would generate less than one ten-thousandth of the measured amount even in best case scenarios of normal decay. And as Dr Paul Giem points out:

‘One can hypothesize that neutrons were once much more plentiful than they are now, and that is why there is so much carbon-14 in our experimental samples. But the number of neutrons required must be over a million times more than those found today, for at least 6,000 years; and every 5,730 years that we put the neutron shower back doubles the number of neutrons required. Every time we halve the duration of the neutron shower we roughly double its required intensity. Eventually the problem becomes insurmountable. In addition, since nitrogen creates carbon-14 from neutrons 110,000 times more easily than does carbon-13, a sample with 0.000 0091% nitrogen should have twice the carbon-14 content of a sample without any nitrogen. If neutron capture is a significant source of carbon-14 in a given sample, radiocarbon dates should vary wildly with the nitrogen content of the sample. I know of no such data. Perhaps this effect should be looked for by anyone seriously proposing that significant quantities of carbon-14 were produced by nuclear synthesis in situ.’3
Also, if atmospheric contamination were responsible, the entire carbon content would have to be exchanged every million years or so. But if this were occurring, we would expect huge variations in radiocarbon dates with porosity and thickness, which would also render the method useless.1 Dr Baumgardner thus first thought that the 14C must have been there right from the beginning. But if nuclear decay were accelerated, say a recent episode of 500 million years worth, it could explain some of the observed amounts. Indeed, his RATE colleagues have shown good evidence for accelerated decay in the past, which would invalidate radiometric dating.
4. The 14C ‘dates’ for the diamonds of 55,700 years were still much older than the biblical timescale. This misses the point: we are not claiming that this ‘date’ is the actual age; rather, if the earth were just a million years old, let alone 4.6 billion years old, there should be no 14C at all! Another point is that the 55,700 years is based on an assumed 14C level in the atmosphere. Since no one, creationist or evolutionist, thinks there has been an exchange of carbon in the diamond with the atmosphere, using the standard formula for 14C dating to work out the age of a diamond is meaningless. Also, 14C dating assumes that the 14C/C ratio has been constant. But the Flood must have buried huge numbers of carbon-containing living creatures, and some of them likely formed today’s coal, oil, natural gas and some of today’s fossil-containing limestone. Studies of the ancient biosphere indicate that there was several hundred times as much carbon in the past, so the 14C/C ratio would have been several hundred times smaller. This would explain the observed small amounts of 14C found in ‘old’ samples that were likely buried in the Flood.

Reference

  1. Cupps, V.R. and Thomas, B., Deep time philosophy impacts radiocarbon measurements, CRSQ 55(4):212–222, Spring 2019. See also the summary article, Thomas, B., Contamination claims can’t cancel radiocarbon results, Acts & Facts 49(4), Apr 2020.
  2. Rotta, R.B., Evolutionary explanations for anomalous radiocarbon in coal? CRSQ 41(2):104–112, September 2004. 14C in coal was reported by: Baumgardner, J., Humphreys, D., Snelling, A. and Austin, S., The Enigma of the Ubiquity of 14C in Organic Samples Older Than 100 ka, Eos Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 84(46), Fall Meeting Suppl., Abstract V32C-1045, 2003. And also: Lowe, D., Problems associated with the use of coal as a source of 14C free background material, Radiocarbon 31:117–120, 1989.
  3. Giem, P., Carbon-14 content of fossil carbon, Origins **51:**6–30 (2001), grisda.org.

The whole point of analysing diamonds for Carbon 14 is that they are the hardest natural substance on the planet and as such are virtually impervious to contamination. Of course you will declare contamination because the alternative is to admit that Diamonds are not hundreds of millions to billions of years old.

Carbon 14 is found in coal also and of course the cry contamination resounds from people who believe in ‘deep time’, but if every sample of coal and diamonds tested is claimed to be contaminated then all radiometric dating is called into question from contamination. As for diamonds, contamination was avoided and ruled out, the diamonds do contain Carbon 14 and are therefore not as old as ‘deep time’ believers would have us believe. God is faithful, the Bible is reliable and can be trusted to mean what it so plainly states about origins.

God Bless,
jon

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Seriously??? You must really be looking for confirmation if this is what it takes to convince you.

This latter suggestion about primordial C-14 appears to have been somewhat spectacularlysupported when Dr Baumgardner sent a diamond for C-14 dating. It was the first timethis had been attempted, and the answer came back positive—i.e. the diamond,formed deep inside the earth in a ‘Precambrian’ layer, neverthelesscontained radioactive carbon, even though it ‘shouldn’t have’.

Where is the paper? What lab? Where is the dating report? What was the prep?

My statement stands. No intrinsic C-14 has ever been found in diamond.

This statement pretty much disqualifies your understanding of radiocarbon dating.

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I’ll contact John Baumgardner and see if I can locate this information.

God Bless,
jon

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Better yet, have him join us!

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The claim that there should be no 14C at all is categorically untrue. There will always be contamination. This is simply one of the most fundamental basics of how measurement works and one that I would expect every professional scientist, every professional engineer and every professional lab technician—no exceptions, no excuses—to be fully aware of and fully prepared to take into account.

And no, there’s nothing “evolutionist” or “secularist” or “materialist” about this whatsoever. It’s nothing to do with “making excuses” to support “belief in deep time.” It is how measurement works in every area of science. You MUST fully account for ALL possible sources of error BEFORE attempting to claim anything out of the ordinary.

I hope you realise that there’s a difference between “above the detection limit” and “above expected levels of contamination”? In order to rule out contamination, you must add up the sum total of all known contamination vectors, so in other words instrument background plus sample preparation plus in situ effects. Baumgardner’s response, which you have quoted here, does not do this. It only takes each of the individual contamination vectors in isolation and makes a case that that particular one can not fully account for the results.

On top of that, you must then allow a reasonable margin (i.e. double the total at least) to allow for the possibility of additional contamination vectors that you may have missed or that may not yet have been categorised, including the possibility of sloppy lab technique, which can be easy to get wrong and tricky to get right. Especially if you are going to try and use your results to claim something extraordinary, such as that hundreds of thousands of other results, all of them far more tightly constrained, far more robust, and far more within their applicable ranges of validity, could all be consistently out by up to six orders of magnitude.

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