[_ Old Earth _] Earth age

[Barbarian]

Since the 19th. century, self proclaimed "experts" have theorized and said the earth is millions or billions of years old. Only in the past fifty years has technology such as Carbon dating and Uranium-lead dating been around.

Actually, Ernest Rutherford successfully used the method to date the age of the earth, about 1910. It's closer to a hundred years than 50.

These were made in an attempt to confirm those theories but are rife with errors. Not only are the measurement results not repeatable, living snails have been measured to be 26,000 years old.

At least aquatic ones have been. It's why you can't use C-14 on mollusk shells; they get most of their carbon used in forming their shells from mineral sources, and that is usually quite ancient, having eroded out of rocks. Hence, scientists know better than to do something like that. Sometimes, unethical creationists occasionally will do it, so that they can misled their more honest followers. There are ways to do this with volcanic rocks, if you know a few tricks. That's been done, too.

Our local college professor no longer talks about these dating methods because they are an embarrassment.

If so, the poor doc is woefully behind the times. Here's a good reference, by the noted geologist Joe Meert, on the way that various dating methods all agree:

http://gondwanaresearch.com/radiomet.htm

When you get done reading the data, you need to ask yourself why, if these different methods are not accurate, why they so closely agree with one another.

It's impossible to ignore this kind of evidence.

 

[Pearly Gator]

The dating methods are neither consistent nor repeatable. So much for the 'science' of it! : : : : : :

 

[Barbarian]

The dating methods are neither consistent nor repeatable. So much for the 'science' of it!

No, that's wrong. Joe's data clearly shows that they are. Even more impressive, different methods give precisely the same ages for the same rocks.

You've been misled. Read Meert's articles and learn about it for real.

 

[Pearly Gator]

Evolutionist William Stansfield, Ph.D., California Polytech State, has stated:

"It is obvious that radiometric techniques may not be the absolute dating methods that they are claimed to be. Age estimates on a given geological stratum by different radiometric methods are often quite different (sometimes by hundreds of millions of years). There is no absolutely reliable long-term radiological 'clock'."


Evolutionist Frederick B. Jueneman candidly summarizes the situation:

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such 'confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man."

 

[Greg]

Days or eras?

Everybody seems to be grasping for straws to prove that their preacher is right... A lot hangs on that: a preacher trying to squeeze God into the limitations of thirteenth-century human understanding is dependent on a whole lot of people who are willing to shut off their intelligence for the comfort of believing that they belong to the in-group that's in the right. This is why we need dogma, not for any purposes of communion with God.

Who says that unless something pops up out of nothing like a magician's trick, it can't have been made by God? Aren't we all made of the dust of the earth--carbon, water, minerals, etc.--like every living thing since the beginning of life? What's so hard about accepting the truth of Genesis, that God made everything all the way from where there was nothing, and also accepting the evidence he's left us of the geological and paleontological processes he used?

If you really believe in the six calendar days of creation, six 24 hour revolutions of the planet, take another look at Genesis. Gen. 2:4 talks about the day when the Lord made the heavens and the earth. One and the same day? Gen. 1:6-8 says the heavens were made on the second day and Gen. 1:9-11 says the earth was made on the third day. Two separate days. Or look at Gen. 1:26-31: Man and woman were made on the sixth day, within the same 24 hours. But Gen. 2 describes how all the animals were made and named before Eve was made from Adam's rib. Adam sighed, "At last!" Not a lot of patience there, if it was just the afternoon of the sixth day? But according to Gen. 1:24-25, land animals and birds were made before man and woman. Confusing. Then Gen. 5:1 talks again about the day Adam and Eve were created.

Why point all this out? Because it shows that if you insist on believing that a "day" in the creation account is 24 hours, you just can't make sense of it. Things are made worse by the fact that Gen. 1 came from one tradition and Gen. 2 from another. Still, the reputation and revenue of a lot of preachers depend on enough of us swallowing the notion of 24 hour creation days. Anyway, where's the logic in insisting on six calendar days of creation but accepting that the earth is round and doesn't form the center of the universe? If you're going to be stuck in the 13th century, be serious about it!

Think a little about the words used in the Bible, and in common usage. Very often "day" means an era or a period of time. Who are we to tell God how he's allowed to work, just because our forebears, who provided the ammunition for all the fundamentalists in the preaching market, didn't know anything about archeology and paleontology? Did Bronze Age Hebrews know anything about those sciences? No. Still, Genesis, as it was recorded then, had to be understandable to them. Look at Genesis and look at the evidence in the earth: It all agrees if you just allow God to use the word Day for an era when something happened. In fact, the Elohim sect providing Gen. 1 had it more right than the Yahwists providing Gen. 2, when their merger took place sometime between the 9th and the 4th centuries BC.

The important thing about Genesis 1 is, that as Bronze Age creation myths go, it's in its own class altogether. It credits the One God of Israel with all of creation, all the way from nothing. All the other creation myths, on the other hand, talk about actions of beings somehow pre-existing when it all began; they can be discounted as serving no other purpose than generating revenue for those who still can get some mileage out of them.

A good way to begin from nothing is with a Big Bang that generates all the energy to provide both matter and energy for a whole universe. Does anybody really think evolutionists can disprove the existence of a Creator by saying that it all happened slowly? If for some reason there were a universe without a Creator, it would be dead and cold already. Worlds and life can only be the result of the loving work of a Creator.

I guess it's fun to argue about carbon dating and all that, but try a leap of faith: God is actually great enough to use long, slow processes for his creation work. Not even Charles Darwin denied the existence of a Creator; the notion that evolution is somehow against belief in God is of a much later date. Hanging on to ideas that have withstood the assault of 600 years of scientific progress may be comforting, since they free you from the need to think, but there's merit to using your God-given intellect, too.

Best,

Greg

 

[Barbarian]

Stansfield is apparently a biologist, and he seems to be unaware of the data such as Dr. Meert's. Here's another way we can be sure the method works:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/rele ... mpeii.html

Argon/Argon methods precisely date lava flows at Pompeii.

I have been unable to find any thing on "Evolutionist Frederick B. Jueneman", other than a cite for science fiction stories, and his supposed argument that the Mesozoic was "within the age and memory of man." He certainly sounds like a creationist, since no evolutionist would make such a statement. Could you point me to his article?

How do the assertions of these rather obscure people, at least one of them an apparent creationist, overcome the evidence I showed you?

 

[Pearly Gator]

Evolution is a belief which it's followers say a long period of time as needed for macro evolution. Ergo, the earth is millions or billions of years old, etc. The concept was theorized centuries ago.

If macro-evolution of kinds were true, there would be evidence. It's proponents believe that given enough time, all things could come into being by chance, or if a Christian, that God uses the random chance to fulfill His will.

Let's Experiment.
(Kids, please don't do these things without adult supervision.)

Take twelve cards and write 1-2-3-C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n, putting one character on each of the twelve cards.

Throw them up in the air.

Did they land in order and spell out "123 Christian"?

Maybe we need more time. So, go onto the roof of your house and throw the cards up into the air. They now have MORE TIME to land in order. Did they?

Let's go up to 1,500 feet in an airplane and throw out the cards, giving them lots of time to land in order.

Let's give the cards more time and go up to 100,000 feet in a baloon and drop them.

Let's go to interstellar space and blow up the cards to see if they come together.

Public School Teacher: "And that, class, is how DNA and RNA came into being."

 

[victorhadin]

False analogy. Throw the cards into the air once and it is damned unlikely indeed, regardless of the height.

Throw them into the air 180 billion times and it's a fair bet that the sequence will appear at least once. You will probably also get 1.5 million 'Chris' repetitions, 450 million 'Ian's, etc etc.

Get the population of China to chuck them in the air once every minute and you'll be waiting for a few hours, chances are, before you get it. Hell; it might even happen on the very first go.

 

[Barbarian]

Evolution is a belief which it's followers say a long period of time as needed for macro evolution. Ergo, the earth is millions or billions of years old, etc. The concept was theorized centuries ago.

Interestingly, something like that argument actually happened. It was between Lord Kelvin (arguably the best physicist since Newton) and Charles Darwin. Kelvin's calculations showed that the Earth could only be a few millions of years old. Darwin pointed out the evidence from biology indicated a far older age. But Kelvin's calculations were correct.

Then radioactivity was discovered, and with it, the source of all that heat in the Earth. And Kelvin conceded that Darwin had been correct.

If macro-evolution of kinds were true, there would be evidence.

If plants had chlorophyll, then they would be green. :

Would you like to review the evidence?

It's proponents believe that given enough time, all things could come into being by chance,

Nope. Natural selection is not about chance.

or if a Christian, that God uses the random chance to fulfill His will.

Nope. God could easily set initial conditions to turn out the way He willed it to be.

Let's Experiment.
(Kids, please don't do these things without adult supervision.)

Take twelve cards and write 1-2-3-C-h-r-i-s-t-i-a-n, putting one character on each of the twelve cards.

Throw them up in the air.

Did they land in order and spell out "123 Christian"?

Maybe we need more time. So, go onto the roof of your house and throw the cards up into the air. They now have MORE TIME to land in order. Did they?

[quote:a9822]More time per trial isn't the way. The number of trials is what counts. To make things easier to explain, let's assume that "123 Christian" is made up of 13 unique symbols. (that way we don't have to complicate the calculation for two "i's")

The number of permutations of 13 things taken 13 at a time is 13! or

1 X 2 X 3 .... X 13 or 6,227,020,800 Over 6 trillion. So the probability of getting them right wouild be 1/13!. On the other hand, there are 6.02214199 × 10^23 molecules in one mole of substance. So as far as life is concerned, it's not that difficult for things to appear, even by random. Of course, chemistry and natural selection are not random.

Here's a better one. If we assume that Pearly has 1000 genes (ridiculous underestimate) and that there are only two alleles for each gene (another very low estimate) then given random distribution of genes among his great-great grandparents, the likelihood of Pearly is less than one divided by 1.07150860718626732094842504906e+301.

Which is so unlikely as to be effectively impossible. Yet here he his posting stuff on the message board. That should be a wake-up call. Victor was more succinct in his presentation; I thought you might like some detail.

[quote:a9822]Public School Teacher: "And that, class, is how DNA and RNA came into being."

[/quote:a9822][/quote:a9822]

Nope. The existing research on RNA genesis is not based on luck of the draw. Would you like to learn about it?

 

[victorhadin]

Pah. You just had to include the space as a character and ignore the two i's. Now my calculations look incorrect. ;)

 

[evanman]

Would an explosion in a print works produce the complete Encyclopedia Brittanica?

 

[evanman]

Or, if we left the printworks over a long enough period of time after the explosion, would the complete Enciclopedia Brittanica evolve out of the wreckage?

But then we are not simply looking for the Enciclopedia Brittanica, we are expected to discover every single book ever published to have evolved from this great explosion!

 

[Barbarian]

Pah. You just had to include the space as a character and ignore the two i's. Now my calculations look incorrect.

A simplification, of course. But it made it easier to calculate and to explain.

 

[Barbarian]

Or, if we left the printworks over a long enough period of time after the explosion, would the complete Enciclopedia Brittanica evolve out of the wreckage?

But then we are not simply looking for the Enciclopedia Brittanica, we are expected to discover every single book ever published to have evolved from this great explosion![/qote]

Hardly. 400 or so genes. And even then, the evidence with replicating chemical systems indicates it's not random.

Indeed, since the Miller-Urey experiment has been validated the discovery that complex organic materials form naturally, there's very little space left to argue.

 

[Featherbop]

That experiment is a poor one. It didn't produce any life from non-living things, only buildind blocks and products of life. No actual life itself came from it. Garbage from what I can see.

 

[Barbarian]

Miller-Urey only showed that the early conditions on the Earth could produce life. It didn't show that it did. However, meteorite data shows that these chemicals did form in the early solar system.

It was a great step forward in understanding abiogenesis. There's a lot of work still to be done. But it's progressing well.

 

[M82A1]

How old has the earth really been dated?

I hear some people say old, some young, some in the middle. Whatever.

But do the dating methods all come up with different ways. Which methods are right?

Are there any good methods?

Are they all fixed?

I know for evolutionists would be defeated if it trurned out the earth is indeed young only a few thousand years old, because evolution needs a long tiome to work, or so goes that false belierf.

Now, most crweationists on the other hand, genarally believe the earth is aboot 6000-8000 thousand years old.

I'm thinking it is, because I don't know who to believe about the dating methods, and the results.

But, it could also be biblical that the earth is very old, beacuse it is unknown how long eve and adam were in the gaarden of eden.

______

What do you think?

The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. I hear people here say that C14 dating only goes back 60,000 years, which is true, but they obviously haven't heard of Radio-Carbon dating. All rocks emit radio-carbons, radio-carbons are mesured by a gieger counter, the less radio-carbon is emmited by rocks, the older they are. And radio-carbon studies aren't done on Earth rocks alone, they are also done on asteroids that hit the Earth. And if the Earth is only 6,000 years old (and it is not!) that wouldn't explain horses, sharks, birds (and other animals that are older than Homo sapiens sapiens), and fossilized blue-green algae (The oldest form of life on the planet).

 

[Barbarian]

Carbon dating, at best, goes back to about 60,000 years. Anything older than that has to be tested with a number of other radioassays. K-Ar and Ar-Ar are two of them.

 

[Rogue 9]

*Chuckle.* And carbon dating has put living clams at 5,000 years old. Says wonders for its accuracy, doesn't it? :

 

[SyntaxVorlon]

BAD SDNET MEMBER!
The fact that it can fail is not admissible as evidence against it. All methods of dating or measuring have a failure rate. Furthermore I think this has been dealt with on Wong's site.
Radioactive decay rates are fixed, if they changed the sun would have dimmed and all life on earth would have ceased.
http://www.stardestroyer.net/Creationis ... an-2.shtml