Jump to content
Join the Unexplained Mysteries community today! It's free and setting up an account only takes a moment.
- Sign In or Create Account -

Young Earth Creationism


Guyver

Recommended Posts

No evidence, no value, simply as that. Cook is simply being a bad scientist by ignoring evidence. It isn't dogma, it is science. Sorry. No evidence, no falsifiable hypothesis, no case. However we tons of evidence pointing to a world being far old than any YEC claims.

There are no theories for YEC, there is no evidence and it isn't science. That is the point. It fails to fulfil scientific criteria. It is not falsifiable and it goes against all available evidence!

Give over, this is honest. You are being intellectually dishonest here, not me. It is neither A) or B) and that phrasing is what makes your question dishonest. What I have told is how science is, the fact that you don't either understand or like this is not dogma, it is scientific method.

Ok you avoided it so I'll ask you directly : Have YOU applied the scientific method to the theories and purported evidence by the YEC's? Spent actual honest time investigating them? If not then what you are saying is DOGMA. That is a fact.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 107
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • Guyver

    31

  • Doug1029

    18

  • Mattshark

    18

  • Farmer77

    9

From Merriam Websters: Empirical 1 : originating in or based on observation or experience <empirical data>

2 : relying on experience or observation alone often without due regard for system and theory <an empirical basis for the theory>

3 : capable of being verified or disproved by observation or experiment <empirical laws>

Based on that definition, you have to admit that when discussing origin of life issues it is a little dishonest to claim those theories are based on empirical data absent conjecture or supposition at a minimum.

Not really: observation-> hypothesis-> experiment (if you falsify hypothesis you repeat with a new hypothesis till you get one that can't be falsified)-> repeat---------------> theory.

You should really learn what science is and how it works before you make such judgements.

http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/PHY_LABS/AppendixE/AppendixE.html

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok you avoided it so I'll ask you directly : Have YOU applied the scientific method to the theories and purported evidence by the YEC's? Spent actual honest time investigating them? If not then what you are saying is DOGMA. That is a fact.

Ok I will say this once more because it IS ignorant to constantly ignore it: YEC has no theory. Their purpoted evidence is a fabrication of real evidence as pointed out earlier in the thread.

Go and learn some basic science and then we will talk.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not really: observation-> hypothesis-> experiment (if you falsify hypothesis you repeat with a new hypothesis till you get one that can't be falsified)-> repeat---------------> theory.

You should really learn what science is and how it works before you make such judgements.

http://teacher.pas.rochester.edu/PHY_LABS/AppendixE/AppendixE.html

Again, for the second time you ignore my point and attempt to derail the conversation through an ad hominem attack by impugning my intelligence. Sad for such an obviously intelligent person to be so intellectually dishonest with himself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok I will say this once more because it IS ignorant to constantly ignore it: YEC has no theory. Their purpoted evidence is a fabrication of real evidence as pointed out earlier in the thread.

Go and learn some basic science and then we will talk.

Ok this will be my last post I swear! (LOL) You claim their evidence is a fabrication of real evidence, um yet you clearly have not thoroughly investigated this for yourself.

Therefore you have a belief, a point of view which you are putting forth without adequate grounds. That is quite literally the definition of dogma :lol:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Again, for the second time you ignore my point and attempt to derail the conversation through an ad hominem attack by impugning my intelligence. Sad for such an obviously intelligent person to be so intellectually dishonest with himself.

I am not ignoring you point am telling you what is wrong with it.

Being ignorant of science is nothing to do with intelligence, it just means you do not understand it at present.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok this will be my last post I swear! (LOL) You claim their evidence is a fabrication of real evidence, um yet you clearly have not thoroughly investigated this for yourself.

Therefore you have a belief, a point of view which you are putting forth without adequate grounds. That is quite literally the definition of dogma :lol:

No, I have seen what they have claimed and seen the evidence that shows it not be true. Except unlike baseless claims and mined quotes on a website, the evidence that contradicts YEC is in the format of scientific papers which refute their claims. Importantly, as a biologist I have seen more than enough work to show evolution is very much real (I did my undergrad lit review on mustelid evolution).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sorry Yeti, I'll have to do this quick.

First thing I would pay attention to, when reading this page critically is this;

The following clocks point to a young earth, solar system, and universe. Taken together, they suggest that the earth is quite young -- probably less than 10,000 years old.

Followed by their first "evidence";

1. Receding Moon 750 m.y.a. max

As to the actual "problem" here, I am unsure of where there math is. Can you find it? Its never a good start when people are making mathematical claims, yet unwilling to post their math for review. From a quick look I see they claim that the Moon's acceleration was greater in the past than now (which isn't correct, lasers left on the moon by NASA show that its actually accelerating away from the earth). Regardless of that, we will need to see their math.

Not to sound judgmental, but I have little faith that the authors of that webpage possess the necessary calculus or diffEQ skills to undergo such a calculation.

2. Oil Pressure:

When oil wells are drilled, the oil is almost always found to be under great pressure. This presents a problem for those who claim "millions of years" for the age of oil, simply because rocks are porous. In other words, as time goes by the oil should seep into tiny pores in the surrounding rock, and, over time, reduce the pressure. However, for some reason it doesn't. Perhaps that's because all of our oil deposits were created as a result of Noah's Flood, about 4600 years ago? Some scientists say that after about 10,000 years little pressure should be left.

Oil is under pressure precisely because the ground is very well at trapping said oil and keeping it from migrating (the term geologists use for oil when it moves from one chamber to another). If these YECs are so confident that oil should be 'leaking' in 'tiny pores' then they should allow us to bury them in one of these reservoir as an experiment. Certainly the tiny pores will facilitate the movement of air to them, which is much less dense than oil and therefore should have no problems keeping them suffocating ^_^

On a more serious note, for oils primary migration (from its place of birth) we are talking about tens of thousands of years. I see they didn't account for that.

3. The Sun:

Measurements of the sun's diameter over the past several hundred years indicate that it is shrinking at the rate of five feet per hour. Assuming that this rate has been constant in the past we can conclude that the earth would have been so hot only one million years ago that no life could have survived. And only 11,200,000 years ago the sun would have physically touched the earth. 9,10,11,12 Also, if the sun were indeed billions of years old, then it does seem a bit odd for its magnetic field to have doubled in the past 100 years, but this is what the evidence suggests.

At no point should one assume that the rate of "shrinking" has been constant-Indeed, there is no shrinking rate, as the sun periodically expands.

I'd just like to point something out here that really captures the essence of this argument. Here is the list of references for this claim;

1 Lubkin, Gloria B., Physics Today, V. 32, No. 9, 1979.

2 Ordway, Richard J., Earth Science and the Environment, New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1974, p. 130. Fig. 5 - 23 on this page gives a good illustration of the accepted evolutionary time scale.

3 Scientific American, V. 239, No. 3, 1978. All articles in this edition list the various evolutionary time scales.

4 Halliday, David and Resnick, Robert, Fundamentals of Physics, New York; Wiley, 1974, Chapter 14.

5 The exact formula must be derived layer by layer using integral calculus. The result is identical to the formula listed, except that it contains an additional factor. The additional factor is so close to unity that it makes little difference in an estimation.

Do you realize how much computer, camera and measurement technology has improved since the 70's? Do you remember the 70's? That was a long time ago. The point is, this is really the crux of the YEC argument-To use outdated or misrepresented 'information' to bolster their claims.

Don't take my word for it though, you should ask a NASA scientist.

I'm going to skip to a couple of other real fast and reply to those. If you have specific ones you were wondering about Yeti, can you copy and paste them in a reply text?

By evolutionary reasoning, dragon bones only occur in the so-called Cretaceous, Jurassic, or Triassic eras.28 According to the geological time chart such creatures (i.e. dinosaurs) died out between 65 and 220 million years ago. What is not well known about these eras is that they are based upon the theory of evolution -- which requires extremely long periods of time. When evolution-biased scientists say that they "know" such things, they not telling the truth. And while they may, in fact, believe such things; however, if they were honest they would admit that such "dates" assigned to these eras are highly questionable.

The name of a give era or epoch is inconsequential. We could say the time period of 200-250 million years ago shall be called the Copastic :tu: That doesn't really matter.

What matters is that Copasetic animals (or more accurately, Triassic animals) are found in the Triassic layer. We don't find something like Ichthyosaur in the Devonian or in the Eocene.

The important question the creationist are missing here (don't even worry about the date for now) is why?

If we wanted to think critically, then we need to ask that important question. Why do we see only certain fossils in certain layers?

From a creation stand-point. That shouldn't logically follow that not only animals, but biological complexity is layered. If however, life evolved over earth's 4.5 billion year history then we would expect to see that.

As to the age of the strata those are dated via different techniques. The neat thing about that is, the techniques agree with one another (within the bounds of respectable margins of error).

5. Helium in the Atmosphere:

Helium is a byproduct of the radioactive decay of uranium-238. As uranium decays, the helium produced escapes from the earth's surface and accumulates in the atmosphere. As time passes, the amount of helium in the atmosphere increases. Scientists have estimated the amount of uranium in the earth's crustal rocks. From this they estimate the amount of helium that should be produced, and from these they can calculate how much helium is being added to the atmosphere over a given amount of time. They also know how much helium is in the atmosphere.

If we use the same assumptions that radiometric dating experts make (i.e.: no initial daughter/byproduct -- in this case helium -- in the earth's early atmosphere, a constant decay rate, and that nothing has occurred to add to or take away the helium), then the earth's atmosphere is at most 1.76 million years old. 16,17 Other estimates say it is much less (or a maximum of only 175,000 years).

Earth is on its third atmosphere. The first was blown off by early solar winds and that process of blow-off still happens.

He is very 'light' and quickly rises to the top of the atmosphere where it is easily removed into space. It is also a noble gas and chemically inert. Hydrogen is easily retained on earth because of its reactivity (despite earth loosing a lot of H2 to space as well). He, doesn't have that luxury.

fore the existence of supposedly "ancient" organic material had been well publicized, it was predicted that "no DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years." 34 This prediction was based upon the observed breakdown of DNA.

Not long after this prediction was made, very old DNA started turning up. For example, at the Clarkia Fossil Beds of northern Idaho, a green magnolia leaf was discovered in strata that is supposed to be 17 million years old.35 Because it was so fresh-looking and still pliable, scientists decided to see if any DNA was present. And to their surprise they discovered that there was, and also that it matched that of modern magnolia trees.

Since then, DNA claims have been made for supposedly older material such as dragon bones,36,37 and insects in amber.38 It was said that the reason the magnolia leaf was preserved was because it was buried in clay,39 and this has a lot of truth to it; however, the 17 million year date is still doubtful. Likewise, scientists say that DNA (from the insects) was preserved because they were entombed in amber.

However, a serious problem arises when we come to the dragon bones; for these were not entombed in amber or clay, but rather in sandstone.40,41 And because sandstone and bone are both porous, this means that ground and rain water would be able to seep into the rocks, and thus into the bones as well. The fact that the outer part of one of these bones was mineralized 42 gives strong evidence that water -- and thus oxygen -- had access to the bones. The fact that the inside of the bones are not mineralized is an indication that they are young. The fact that the partially mineralized bone had (what looked like) red blood cells in it 43 is a strong indication that it is young: most likely less than 10,000 years old.

DNA, rather any competent organic molecule has no 'shelf-life', so to say. If a molecule is chemically stable, then energetically it is under no obligation to spontaneously degrade (in fact that would be a violation of a certain entropic law that YECs are always crying about).

Anyway, I would again like to illustrate a point on the 'moral fiber' of the YEC argument. Their DNA 'sell-by' date is given as reference number 34.

I took the liberty of logging onto nature and looking up the article (you need a log into nature to do so).

The 'article' is a "news and views" (catchy way to say 'op-ed') piece on the possibilities of DNA amplification on once dead organisms.

To put the quote mine into context:

Unusually good preservation conditions, when a basalt flow dammed a steep wooded valley creating a deep anoxic lake which silted up rapidly, have produced the record for the oldest DNA so far. This was from a magnolia leaf between 17 and 20 million years old. Leaves of other species from the same deposits, including cypress, oak and tulip tree, have also given DNA. The sequences of the chloroplast rubisco genes are recognizably specific and the results have now been verified in three different laboratories. This means these compression fossils defy the prediction, from in vitro estimates of the rate of spontaneous hydrolysis, that no DNA would remain intact much beyond 10,000 years.

This paper was written in 1991. In the 70's and 80's some experiments were done which showed the 'shelf-life' for in vitro DNA could possibly be as low as 10,000 years (though many times this was not spontaneous hydrolysis, rather the result of poorly separated enzymes). The author is simply pointing out what the scientist of his day had realized and what the scientists of the prior 2 decades had failed to understand.

As we know now there is no specific 'shelf-life' per-say to DNA.

Anyway, got to stop now Yeti. Need sleep.

Edit: Sorry if there is any terrible English mistakes or jumbled-nonsensical grammar. I'm too tired to revise at the moment. :sleepy:

Edited by Copasetic
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8. Direct Dating of Dragon Bones:

Palaeontologists as a rule don't date individual fossils, they date the layer they are found in.

When you are dealing with hundreds or thousands of specimens it makes no sense to date them directly.

All the dribble about "C14" is just a strawman, nobody with any credibility is going to use C14 to date Cretaceous or older fossils.

13. Niagara Falls:

*slaps forehead

The concrete on my driveway is eroding at approxiamately .0125 inches per year, doing the math, it looks like my driveway is no more than about 20 years old.

Therefore the age of the earth = 20 years ( plus or minus )

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It wasn't just the catholic church (seems the scientific community likes revisionist history almost as much as the religious community) but that really wasn't my point so lets not argue that any further. My point was that when people, be it individuals or groups, get stuck in a paradigm it often is quite literally impossible for them to see facts which do not fit their paradigm.

It is said that science advances one death at a time. If you have invested your whole career in pursuing a path of investigation that turns out to be wrong, it is a little hard to give it up. We generally have to wait for these folks to die before we can move ahead.

Doug

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just wanted to say thank you to all who've taken the time to respond in this thread, especially Doug and Cope who have offered up some refutations. I'm up to my elbows in alligators right now, but as soon as i'm caught up I'll be back. I haven't abandoned the thread.

I understatnd people's criticisms, that the YEC's base their beliefs on antiquated ideas, science, what have you. Also, Matt's criticisms that they do not actually do science, but rather make inferences based on what science has already done. I get that and will respond to all the criticisms and points as soon as I get the time.

I would raise one point here. They do have one point that is scientific and does have some research backing it up, and that is the idea of natural clocks. I think if one is to refute YEC then you're going to have to look at their arguments for natural clocks and address it. Anyway, I'll be back as soon as I can. Regards to all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just wanted to say thank you to all who've taken the time to respond in this thread, especially Doug and Cope who have offered up some refutations. I'm up to my elbows in alligators right now, but as soon as i'm caught up I'll be back. I haven't abandoned the thread.

I understatnd people's criticisms, that the YEC's base their beliefs on antiquated ideas, science, what have you. Also, Matt's criticisms that they do not actually do science, but rather make inferences based on what science has already done. I get that and will respond to all the criticisms and points as soon as I get the time.

I would raise one point here. They do have one point that is scientific and does have some research backing it up, and that is the idea of natural clocks. I think if one is to refute YEC then you're going to have to look at their arguments for natural clocks and address it. Anyway, I'll be back as soon as I can. Regards to all.

What natural clocks are you referring to here? Radiometric ones? Because despite the simplicity of it, not any ol' idiot can go gather up the correct rocks to date. There's a reason not anyone can get a job as a trained geologist-The reason being education and training.

When dating rocks, we just can't go around picking them all willy-nilly for precisely the reason that YEC's complain of (and what they dishonestly do to 'prove' their point).

After that the rest is just maths;

This is wrong, things decay precisely because they unstable.

All radioactivity is the result of isotopes which are unstable. Let's use an example with hydrogen. 99% of all hydrogen has 1 proton and 0 neutrons in its nucleus. This is a stable configuration and won't decay. Isotope simply means increasing or decreasing the number of neutrons in the atomic nucleus. So a hydrogen with 1 proton and 1 neutron is an isotope (as it is not the most abundant, it is a variation of hydrogen). It is stable though and doesn't decay.

A hydrogen with 1 proton and 2 neutrons or 3H is another isotope of hydrogen. The number of protons and neutrons in this nucleus though cause it to be 'unbalanced' and thus not stable. Nature's solution is for it to decay to a more stable atomic nucleus.

So in the 3H nucleus, one of the neutrons "turn into" a proton (we can go into how if you want later, but that is the subject of advanced nuclear/particle physics). This then gives us 2 protons and 1 neutron, sound familiar? It should its helium and is stable.

Now notice that the atomic mass remained the same (protons=neutrons for atomic weight). So we went, from 3 nucleons to 3 nucleons, which is good because mass must be conserved. But energy and charge have to be conserved as well. And we just created a problem with charges. Because on one side we have 1 proton or a +1. On the other we have 2 protons or +2. So to counter this the reaction has to give off a electron (-1 charge) to balance everything out.

You can write the reaction as follows;

3H →3He2 + 0e-

The amount of time for half of a sample of tritium (3H) to decay will always be 12.32 years.

As Doug pointed out on the other topic, for one atom chances of decaying are random. When you have many, many atoms (like greater than or equal to Avagrado's number) then the decay follows a precise statistical pattern.

What we can do is derive the half-life and decay constant of the radioactive material then use that to date samples. Let's use tritium as an example. Let's say we wished to find the half-life of tritium so we can date a sample of it.

We can go into the lab to determine this using the formula (for logarithmic decay):

A=Aoe-kt

Where A, is the amount of sample at time, t, Ao is the initial amount of sample and k is the decay constant. (e is the base constant of the natural logarithm).

So let's say we had 1500 grams of tritium and monitored its mass loss over 1 year. After a year we find that 94.529% of its mass remains. First we need to determine tritium's universal decay constant, k.

We can say that A= .94529 Ao and we know this took place over time t= 1 year.

So substituting in our formula we get:

.94529Ao = Aoe-k*1 year

Notice the Ao cancel on each side;

.94529 = e-k*1 year

To solve for k, take the natural log of both sides:

ln (.94529) = ln (e-k*1 year)

Because of the properties of natural logarithms we can rewrite it as follows;

ln (.94529) = -k*1 year;

ln (.94529)/-1 year = k;

k = .0563 y-1

Now we know the rate constant of tritium, this is a constant and is the same for all tritium. It doesn't matter where or how big your samples are, if measured accurately it will always be the same. There are also other ways we can check this, but we won't go into that here.

Now, Let's figure out the half-life so we can date some imaginary samples.

The half life just means when one half of the sample has decayed. In other words we want to solve for t, when;

A=(1/2)Ao

Since we solved for our rate constant above, we can simply plug and chug with our observational numbers from the lab!

(1/2)Ao = Aoe-kt, (remember we solved for k above, but I am going to write k to save time for now)

Again our Ao's cancel out and we take the natural log of both sides to get;

ln (1/2) = ln e-kt

Again using the properties of logs we get;

ln (1/2) = -kt

Then solve for t

t= ln (1/2)/-k when k =.0563, and after plugging in the faithful calculator we get

t1/2 = 12.31 years.

(Quick side note, because we have rounded our k and t1/2 are slightly off real world data, the half life of tritium is actually closer to 12.32 and the decay constant is closer to .0565, but for a forum example its close enough, We're not building an Ark or anything! [img src="http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/public/style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/wink2.gif" style="vertical-align:middle" emoid=";)" border="0" alt="wink2.gif" /] ).

So that is how scientists come up with the half-life and decay constant, which are universally specific for a group of decaying atoms. But what can we do with it? How do we use this information to find an age?

How on Earth do scientists figure out the date of something if they don't know the initial amount Ao!

The answer is, reasoning and math! (damn you math!)

As we saw in the formula above for tritium's decay 1 daughter nucleus (3He2) is produced through the decay of 1 parent nucleus (3H) which gives us a 1 to 1 ratio and we can express this mathematically as well;

A + D =Ao

Where A is the amount of parent isotope we measured in a sample at some time t, D is the amount of daughter isotope we measured in the sample and Ao is the initial amount at t=0.

Thus we can rewrite our formula as follows;

A=Aoe-kt Substitute for Ao as we get;

A=(A+ D)e-kt Then solve the equation for time, t and we get

t= ln (A/(A+D)) /-k and which we can rewrite as;

t= (1/k)ln ((D/A) +1) So the term (D/A) that is the measured amount of daughter to parent negates having to know the initial amount of parent isotope.

So let's say we had some thing that contained tritium and we wanted to know how old it was. So we go into the lab and using some very cool equipment (something called mass spectrometer, which measures the relative concentrations of atoms in a sample) find that we have 7 grams of the daughter isotope, 3He2, and 2 grams of the parent isotope, 3H.

We just simply plug and chug with our formula from above;

t= (1/k)ln ((D/A) +1);

t= (1/.0563 years)ln ((7g/2g) +1);

t= 26.72 years old!

Hope that example helped clear up some of your misconceptions Essence

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What natural clocks are you referring to here? Radiometric ones? Because despite the simplicity of it, not any ol' idiot can go gather up the correct rocks to date. There's a reason not anyone can get a job as a trained geologist-The reason being education and training.

When dating rocks, we just can't go around picking them all willy-nilly for precisely the reason that YEC's complain of (and what they dishonestly do to 'prove' their point).

What's up Cope! I hate to get ahead of myself because I haven't really been able to scrutinize the thread - I've been real busy the past couple of days. Regarding natural clocks, here's their first premise - quoting from the page in the OP.

Time Clocks:

A "clock" is any geophysical or astronomical process that is changing at a constant rate. Clocks may be used to estimate how long a process has been going on for. All clocks (including radiometric ones) require the use of at least three assumptions. These are:

1. The rate of change has remained constant throughout the past.

2. The original conditions are known.

3. The process has not been altered by outside forces.

In each of these cases it is not possible to prove that the above assumptions are true. For example flooding can greatly alter sedimentation rates, and with clocks over 5,000 years old, the original conditions cannot be known with certainty. Therefore scientists must make a guess with regard to what they believe the original conditions might have been. The shorter the time involved, the more likely it is that a specific process has been constant, and unaltered by external influences.

The following clocks point to a young earth, solar system, and universe. Taken together, they suggest that the earth is quite young -- probably less than 10,000 years old.

Here's the link from the OP for the other natural clocks, of which there are several to look at.

http://www.earthage.org/youngearthev/evidence_for_a_young_earth.htm

Also, you asked for the paper on the Earth-Moon system.....I'm still looking. Here's one link and I'll try to find the other.

http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=204

Looking for the original DeYoung paper. Can't find it. But here's something that seems similar. You may like this because these guys are so convinced that their math is correct - they're putting out a challenge to one such as yourself. I hope this information is enough. I'll try to go back and find the original DeYoung paper. Now that he's written a book, that's what seems to come up. I'll check again.

http://www.scienceagainstevolution.org/v4i2f.htm

Edited by Guyver
Link to comment
Share on other sites

See what happens when you rush things? I guess that last link explains a discussion between two people, one who refutes DeYoungs original findings, which Cope did as well, then offers his own. Sorry for the confusion. Gotta go.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

One thing I see that is questionable about this is that they are trying to build a case against the line dating back to mitochondrial Eve claiming that mtDNA isn't strictly maternal. As far as I can find, there has only been one documented case of this in humans, and it was linked to infertility. So I'm not seeing how they could be using a case of an infertile male to prove some paternal involvement of mtDNA to interfere with tracing a straight line back through the maternal line. Being infertile would eliminate a man from passing on anything to future generations so it seems to me they are defeating their own case trying to make something of this one and only case of it being known to happen. They, of course, leave that out here: http://www.trueorigin.org/mitochondrialeve01.asp

This is the actual study they are mentioning: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/347/8/576

I haven't had time to look at that study very close, but this is something that I did notice.

there is the case of turtle shell male cats and calico male cats, most are infertal but not all.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I kind of have paper to get in within the next 3 hours, so I must be brief. However, I can directly answer to *several* of the ideas presented on http://www.earthage.org/youngearthev/evidence_for_a_young_earth.htm

1) Receding moon : The current arrangement of the continents is particularly good at dissipating tidal energy and moving the moon out. The Americas and Eurasia/Africa form 2 bands of land that nearly pass from pole to pole. The tidal bulges on the oceans experience a lot of drag trying to go around these, and get pulled further off the line between the Earth and moon, dragging the moon outwards more strongly. Most other possible arrangements of the continents would produce significantly less tidal drag, and the continents have been all over the place.

3) The sun: these measurements have been supplanted by more accurate ones in more recent decades, which show the sun to A) vibrate with several hour timescales by a large amount and B ) puff in and out during its 11 year cycle.

4) The age of the oldest living thing is irrelevant to the age of the Earth. However, this is only talking about the oldest INDIVIDUAL living thing. There are clones of identical trees that fill up dozens of square miles, spreading and reproducing via vegetative reproduction; some of these have been found to be 43,000 years old (http://waynesword.palomar.edu/ww0601.htm)

6) Short period comets: the article makes the claim that the several hundred short period comets in the solar system could not be more than a few thousand years old. THIS IS TRUE, though not as true as the article claims - their lifetime is probably more like tens of thousands of years. However, the long-period comets (which we see, and are an observed fact) provide an easy source for them. Some fraction of these objects pass near the planets, and lose orbital energy to them (and some gain energy and are ejected from the solar system, never to come back). These become stuck in small orbits, where they eventually lose their volatiles, and are slowly scattered about until they either hit a planet, hit the sun, are scattered back out of the solar system, etc.

7) The Earth's magnetic field: It is all but certain that the Earth's magnetic field has weakened since it was younger. The moon shows evidence on its surface of having had a global magnetic field in the past, as does the planet Mars. Neither of these objects have one now. Eventually the Earth will lose its field as well - but probably not until rather far in the future. Anyway, the assertion that each reversal inevitably runs down the intensity is false though - these fields are the results of dynamos, which nonlinearly amplify currents and charge separations until a tiny electrical current is amplified and creates a huge magnetic field. This draws its energy from the convection currents in the core of the Earth. This will have died down a bit over the age of the earth, but an individual reversal does nothing to damp it. The extrapolation of the current behavior of the Earth's magnetic field back hundreds of thousands of years is also laughable - these fields behave chaotically and nonlinearly.

8) dinosaur bone dating: I do not have access to the books that claim carbon dates for dinosaur bones. That being said, if carbon dating is done incorrectly on samples that are not well isolated you can have all kinds of problems.

9) Dinosaur "Blood". I have seen the electron micrographs of these samples. They are not even intact cells, they found RESIDUE that sort of maintained the general shape of blood vessels. There was enough protein in place that the sequence of T Rex hemoglobin could be determined, and it was closest to that of chicken hemoglobin. There was no DNA. Also, what is odd about finding bacteria perserved in salt for 250 million years? It is a bizarre situation for a very small object. It can be done.

"unfossilized" dinosaur bones. non-permineralized does not mean nonfossilized. They just havent had their minerals replaced. All their organic components are gone. What is likely happening here is that a layer that contained these bones was raised up in the formation of the Alaskan rockies, and is eroding away. Fossils have to form in sedimentary rock.

10) I do not know enough about Axel Heiberg and Ellesmere Islands

11) Carbon 14 in the atmosphere: In recent decades, atomic tests have completely frakked up the carbon ratios in our atmosphere. Samples taken after the 40s are useless.

12) No one thinks the Dead Sea is as old as the Earth. It probably isnt even as old as the Mediterranean, which is all of a million years old. Lakes and rivers change on thousand year timescales; I would not be surprised at the dead see being only a few tens of thousands of years old.

13) Age of Niagra Falls: There is NO WAY Niagra Falls should be as old as the Earth. It should be younger than the end of the last glaciation, which happened about 10,000 years ago - which fits perfectly with its estimated age of 7,000-8,000 years.

14) What do historical records have to do with the age of the Earth? At ALL?

15) I do not know enough about the San Andreas Fault to comment.

16) I looked up the paper cited, claiming that the mutation rate in mitochondria was higher than previously determined. The paper was completely misappropriated. The paper measured the muations in HEART mitochondria as a result of AGING and metabolism-caused mutation. If you were to measure the relevant rates, that is, the mutations in the GERMLINE that make it from generation to generation, you need to directly measure people that you know when their most common ancestor was. This has been fairly well calibrated, and recent measures of mutations in the nuclear genome have jived perfectly with mutation rates derived from evolutionary models. The germline has a significantly lower mutation rate than general body cells.

17) What does exponential population growth have to do with the age of the earth? It has only been exponential for the past 300 years! It was fairly stable at a few hundred million for thousands of years before that. This is transparently laughable reasoning.

19) Rapid mountain uplift. The source is the ICR - HARDLY an unbiased source :lol:. I do not doubt that the rates of mountain building could vary chaotically with time, however I do know that as of right now several mountain ranges are growing (himalayas, etc) some are shrinking (appelacians) and some are static. Erosion is a HUGE force - the Alps lose almost the entire volume of a mountian in erosion each year.

20) Carbon from supposedly old sources - this is nothing but a litany of badly designed experiments that used c14 dating wrong.

21) Dark matter and spiral galaxies. This section operates under the misapprehension that old spiral galaxies should have their arms obliterated by their differential rotation. This is a misapprehension of what the arms ARE. The arms are density waves, brought about by the non-spherically symmetrical status of the gas and dust in the nebula. They are areas of slightly higher density, that gas and stars move in and out of all the time, not stable objects. They are brighter than the rest of a galaxy because stars are born faster inside them, and large stars only last a few million years - not enough time to drift very far from their points of origin. Spiral arms do not wind or unwind over galactic timescales.

22) zircons and their helium diffusion rates: I do not have enough background to really comment on this, except for two things: A) the citation is from "creationresearch.org", not a very good soure. B) the radioactive dating date already indicates ages of billions of years for these crystals.

I also have to say - what is the reason to believe that radioactive decay could have ever had a different haflife than today? It is dependant on the laws of physics which underlie the very structure of matter. You mess with the decay rates of atoms, you destroy the capacity for anything like the matter we know and love to exist. It is a probabilistic quantum tunneling of nucleons out of a potential well - its that simple.

Wow that wound up being longer than I expected. I GOTTA get back to my paper.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

8) dinosaur bone dating: I do not have access to the books that claim carbon dates for dinosaur bones. That being said, if carbon dating is done incorrectly on samples that are not well isolated you can have all kinds of problems.

Carbon 14 has a maximum reach of about 40,000 years (currently). We think it might be possible to reach 60,000 years. There is simply no way it could be used to age a dinosaur bone which would be 65 million years old at minimum. Somebody is making up fairy tales.

11) Carbon 14 in the atmosphere: In recent decades, atomic tests have completely frakked up the carbon ratios in our atmosphere. Samples taken after the 40s are useless.

As long as the sample has remained separated from the atmosphere there is no problem. Even brief exposure, such as the few minutes needed to extract the sample and place it in a sealed container (Doesn't even have to be sealed - I use aluminum foil.) is not a problem.

I wouldn't describe samples of living tissue laid down after 1945 as useless. The 14C pulse in these samples is so huge that there is no doubt that they are of recent origin, even before the dating formulae are applied. It should be possible to determine average isotope ratios and standard errors for these years and, thus, extract some useable dates from the samples. This will likely not work real well until the isotope ratios in the atmosphere once again reach equilibrium. I am unsure about how long that might take. Eventually enough readioactivity should decay to make accurate dating possible again; however, for several hundred years at least, there will be a period for the latter half of the 20th century when 14C dating won't work very well.

12) No one thinks the Dead Sea is as old as the Earth. It probably isnt even as old as the Mediterranean, which is all of a million years old. Lakes and rivers change on thousand year timescales; I would not be surprised at the dead see being only a few tens of thousands of years old.

The Dead Sea sits in the southern Arabah which is a northern extension of Africa's Great Rift. The valley is millions of yeara old; the sea, however is younger. I have read some articles on the age of the Dead Sea, but can't for the life of me, remember what they said. I'll see if I can dig up the information again.

13) Age of Niagra Falls: There is NO WAY Niagra Falls should be as old as the Earth. It should be younger than the end of the last glaciation, which happened about 10,000 years ago - which fits perfectly with its estimated age of 7,000-8,000 years.

The Niagara Gorge is about 14,000 years old. The St. David's Gorge (buried under glacial till) is about 50,000 years old. There are several other buried gorges cut into the Niagara Escarpment.

There was a period about 9000 years ago during which the drainage from Lakes Michigan and Huron flowed eastward through the Ottawa. Isostatic rebound raised the land surface to the east, rerouting the flow through Lake St. Clair into Lake Erie. That happened about 7000 to 8000 years ago. This raised Lake Erie's surface until it overflowed, reactivating the Niagara River and Niagara Falls.

While the Niagara Gorge is about 14,000 years old, during its most-recent incarnation, it has only been active for about 7000 to 8000 years.

17) What does exponential population growth have to do with the age of the earth? It has only been exponential for the past 300 years! It was fairly stable at a few hundred million for thousands of years before that. This is transparently laughable reasoning.

One good epidemic, of which there have been many, would demolish the argument. Anybody remember the Black Death?

Besides, human population growth is not exponential; a logistic curve fits better; a hyper-logistic curve is even better. However, no curve is really accurate beyond 20 years or so; changes in birth rates are just not that predictable.

20) Carbon from supposedly old sources - this is nothing but a litany of badly designed experiments that used c14 dating wrong.

Amen! if anybody says they got a carbon age greater than 40,000 years, they're not telling you the truth.

I also have to say - what is the reason to believe that radioactive decay could have ever had a different haflife than today? It is dependant on the laws of physics which underlie the very structure of matter. You mess with the decay rates of atoms, you destroy the capacity for anything like the matter we know and love to exist. It is a probabilistic quantum tunneling of nucleons out of a potential well - its that simple.

The sun is a variable star. Variations in its output affect the rate of 14C production. These have been measured using radioactivity in wood from cross-dated tree rings. We know what those variations have been for the past 10,000 years or so and can correct for them.

Doug

Link to comment
Share on other sites

12) No one thinks the Dead Sea is as old as the Earth. It probably isnt even as old as the Mediterranean, which is all of a million years old. Lakes and rivers change on thousand year timescales; I would not be surprised at the dead see being only a few tens of thousands of years old.

I checked. A series of sediment cores from the northern end of the Dead Sea produced a maximum age of a little over 10,000 years. One core came from deep, continuously-flooded sediments. There were three or four others that were taken in shallower water that showed dry periods. During the Altithermal the Dead Sea very nearly went dry, but not quite.

Doug

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just had a few minutes to drop in and read the last posts. Thanks Torgo and Doug for the time you put in. I'm still swamped right now, anyone else busy out there? I'll read the entire thread again and especially focus on the refutational type responses as soon as I can. From a cursory review, it sure seems like science doesn't support YEC. If I don't make it back beforehand, I'd like to wish you all a

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Carbon 14 has a maximum reach of about 40,000 years (currently). We think it might be possible to reach 60,000 years. There is simply no way it could be used to age a dinosaur bone which would be 65 million years old at minimum. Somebody is making up fairy tales.

Or men of straw.

I don't know how we can stress this enough to make it clear to everyone, C14 IS NOT used to date dinosaur fossils, period.

Show me someone who does, and I'll show you someone who hasn't got a clue what they are doing.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok this will be my last post I swear! (LOL) You claim their evidence is a fabrication of real evidence, um yet you clearly have not thoroughly investigated this for yourself.

Therefore you have a belief, a point of view which you are putting forth without adequate grounds. That is quite literally the definition of dogma :lol:

Why would I formulate a hypothesis that goes against every single bit of evidence available. You only do that if you are trying to prove something instead of trying to find the best answer for the evidence that you see.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Maybe someone have posted this, but you can see their objectivity on the subject by looking at their pg about old earth

http://www.earthage.org/youngearthev/Old_Earth_Evidence.htm

While I'm aware that scientific knowledge do change over time and it is perfectly sensible to question existing knowledge, I'm curious to know why these people never questions their doctor's opinion if the doctor said they got cancer <_<

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just re-read the last couple of pages. It seems that the primary criticism that most people are leveling at YEC is that "real" science is the superior approach to trying to understand the age of the earth. The reason for this is that "real" science is more objective and is willing to make adjustments to (i don't know what to call it - it's not truth i'm looking to use here) current understandings let's say.

While YEC is biased because rather than actually doing science objectively, they use what's already been evaluated by the scientific community and interpret the data based on presuppositions.

Still, having said that it's hard to say exactly how old the earth really is. I understand that each layer of the fossil record corresponds to a certain "time." It takes time for those layers to form. How much time is open to debate. I don't really know what else to say about it right now. Thanks again to everyone who posted, I'm sure I'll be going back to this thread and reading it from time to time as I seem to get interested in this topic on a regular basis. Regards.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I just re-read the last couple of pages. It seems that the primary criticism that most people are leveling at YEC is that "real" science is the superior approach to trying to understand the age of the earth. The reason for this is that "real" science is more objective and is willing to make adjustments to (i don't know what to call it - it's not truth i'm looking to use here) current understandings let's say.

While YEC is biased because rather than actually doing science objectively, they use what's already been evaluated by the scientific community and interpret the data based on presuppositions.

I disagree here Guyver. "Real" science sounds like the whackado of some previous (now extinct) members.

There is only science and there is no valid scientific evidence that points to the earth being young. Really, there's none. Intentionally misusing a dating tool or quote mining an opinion piece is not science. I don't know what name you want to give that kind of malarky, but it certainly isn't science.

Young earther's problem, well any creationist really, is they start with their ending in mind then try and fill in pieces of the story that only agree with their ending. Unfortunately science simply doesn't work like that. Not because some atheist prick scientist says so, but rather a history failed "science". There are literally thousands of examples of how one ought not to do science.

Secondly, Young earther's don't necessarily use what's already been 'evaluated'-They use only things that agree with their worldview. How that is not obvious to everyone, I don't really know. Any and all data and evidence contrary to their point of view (which turns out to really be all of it) is dismissed, bam-boozled or ignored. Its never explained, its never refuted and when you shove it down a Young earther's throat they simply click their "autobots, transform!" button and morph into deaf, broken-record player.

Still, having said that it's hard to say exactly how old the earth really is. I understand that each layer of the fossil record corresponds to a certain "time." It takes time for those layers to form. How much time is open to debate. I don't really know what else to say about it right now. Thanks again to everyone who posted, I'm sure I'll be going back to this thread and reading it from time to time as I seem to get interested in this topic on a regular basis. Regards.

Each sedimentary layer corresponds to a certain age, as sediments are laid down in layers. This is pretty obvious to anyone who wants to do the slightest bit of study of geology. For instance, deep ocean deposits can be differentiated from shallow oceans and seas because the grain of particle that makes up the sedimentation. Shallow water (like coastal waters) have much greater energy because of wave trains. Waves can carry and move much coarser sediment than water with less energetic currents.

What we then find is that certain fossils are found only in certain layers. This is something very important I pointed out earlier and it got no comment. Let's again, forget ages for a moment and just do some critical thinking.

For example, in the rock layer we describe as Archean, we find stromatolite fossils. Which we know are laid down by microorganisms and who's ancestors still lay down today.

In Ediacaran rock we find Porifera-like fossils. Like the Dickinsonia;

dickinsonia.jpg

Which is the first large and complex multicellular life we find. Never before.

In Paleozoic rock we find the first footprints of animals out of water. We find vascular plants, sharks in the ocean, insects and in the latter half; tetrapods.

Etc, etc, etc.

With your critical thinking cap on and no consideration of age (only relative ages) we should pay attention to these two points.

1. Certain fossil 'types' are found only in certain layers and their predecessors.

2. The deeper and older the layer, the more simple life becomes-The complexity of life is found advancing through the layers.

Now, if we were Young earther's (which we aren't) our science would be to find a way that this can fit with the story of creation-All the other evidence, we throw out because it disagrees.

Since we aren't YECs we need to explain how such a thing could happen. It doesn't logically follow that life should be found layered in complexity like this if everything was created at one time. Similarly, it doesn't logically follow that life should be found layered like this if Noah's flood happened.

To answer this paleontological riddle we then turn to the unifying theory of biology-Evolutionary theory, specifically descent with modification. Which would logically follow this progression.

Now as far as the ages are concerned, we do know the ages. Radiometric techniques are absolute dating methods. To explain; Above we were talking about the layers, relative to each other. That is to say, their ages relative to each other. We can say the Triassic rock occurs under Jurassic rock and is therefore older. Thus we know the ages of the fossils relative to each other. Triassic fossils are older than Jurassic fossils. However that doesn't really help us figure out the actual age of characteristic band of rock we call the Triassic, or Jurassic, or Archean etc.

To do that we need an absolute technique that will allow us to say this band of rock occurs for the periods of "X" to "Y" number of years before present.

No matter what absolute technique we use; Oxidizable Carbon Ratio, Amino acids Racemization, Electron Spin Resonance, Fission Track, archaeomagnetism, Radio-carbon, Optically Stimulated Luminescence, Thermoluminescence, Potassium-Argon, Uranium-lead, Samarium-neodymium, Argon-Argon, Rhenium-Osmium, etc all agree with the antiquity of the earth.

Those methods with have the greatest clock to measure all point to the earth being between 4 and 5 billion years old. And the most accurate of those point to the earth being ~4.5 billion years old.

Of course those dates have an associated margin of error, but this margin of error doesn't remotely aid Young Earther's.

Will we ever know the exact moment the earth was created? No (and I normally don't make such absolute statements), and the bottom line is, who really cares?

For all intents and purposes and when dealing with dates so old, 4,548,571,210 is the same as 4,501,379,234. The millions of years discrepancy on this kind of timescale is simply irrelevant.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.