[_ Old Earth _] Evidence for Early Civilization vs. the Bible

[Packrat]

Nuclear decay is not in any measurable way affected by conditions which occur on earth.

By that you mean that it's not affected by naturally occurring conditions? But it could still be affected by man-made conditions (however greatly or slightly)?

Oh, and thanks for clearing that all up for me. I thought there was something wrong with my understanding of one of those diagrams of the creation process of C14. So C14 cannot be turned back into N14 by a proton being added again and a neutron being ejected from it? If not, could you explain why? I apologize for my lack of understanding when it comes to chemistry. Please bear with me. I'm learning... :bday:

Ok. Then I have another question. Is it possible for an organism to contain any amount of N14 in it? If so, is it possible for an organism to contain large amounts of N14? Would birds at high altitudes contain unusual amounts of N14 or C14 in them since both, you've stated, exist in the upper atmosphere?

What about plants that work off of chemosynthesis instead of photosynthesis? They both require CO2, but is C14 involved in the chemosynthesis of deep sea plants? If not, would any C14 be present in these organisms then?

 

[jwu]

By that you mean that it's not affected by naturally occurring conditions? But it could still be affected by man-made conditions (however greatly or slightly)?

What's the difference? Man made conditions do nothing but to mimic conditions which also could occur in nature. We can tinker with pressure, temperature, radiation - all of which occur in nature as well.

As previously mentioned, the highest change of a decay rate which has been achieved was 0.8%- and in that case scientists tried really hard to affect the decay rate, yet that's all which they achieved.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/P ... rates.html

Oh, and thanks for clearing that all up for me. I thought there was something wrong with my understanding of one of those diagrams of the creation process of C14. So C14 cannot be turned back into N14 by a proton being added again and a neutron being ejected from it? If not, could you explain why? I apologize for my lack of understanding when it comes to chemistry. Please bear with me. I'm learning... #Bday

C14 typically decays by beta emission (emitting a positron, the positively charged antimatter counterpart of an electron). I'm not aware of any instance of observed proton emission from C14. It may occur, but it's negligible.

Then I have another question. Is it possible for an organism to contain any amount of N14 in it? If so, is it possible for an organism to contain large amounts of N14?

Roughly 78% of the air which we breathe consists of N14 ;) It's the most common isotope of nitrogen, pretty much all the nitrogen in your body is N14.

Would birds at high altitudes contain unusual amounts of N14 or C14 in them since both, you've stated, exist in the upper atmosphere?

The atmosphere is pretty much mixed, i doubt that high altitude air remains there long enough to accumulate a significant amount without transferring it to the lower atmosphere - production of C14 is a rather slow process.
However...it is formed mostly in altitudes of 10-30km...there aren't many birds flying that high. Moreover, the respiratory system pretty much rejects the CO2 in which the atoms are bound - CO2 is what we exhale after all. Of course, some inhaled CO2 might get into the bloodstream...but it won't be "built into" the organism, as it's considered a waste product there and will be exhaled at the next opportunity. The only way how C14 atoms can get permanently into the organism is by eating them while they are bound somewhere that is of use to the organism, e.g. in sugar or fat.

Hence pretty much all the C14 in an organism is attained by eating plants, or animals which ate such plants (or which ate other animals which ate such plants and so on...) - and that only includes plants which grow under air.

Marine vegetation does not include as much C14 as it is not exposed to air, and hence organisms whose diet consists mostly of seafood or things which eat seafood themselves won't give a good C14 reading - they contain less C14 than those which get their C14 from terrestrial vegetation and such give a C14 reading which is too old. So don't be surprised when you come across websites announcing that e.g. live mollusks were carbon dated to be thousands of years old - that's not a surprise at all, C14 doesn't work with marine life for the aforementioned known reason. That doesn't affect the validity of the methodology for terrestrial life.

Note that contamination by inhaling would result in a C14 reading which is too young, the sample would actually be older than the instruments indicate.

 

[Packrat]

Note that contamination by inhaling would result in a C14 reading which is too young, the sample would actually be older than the instruments indicate.

Yep. You already made me aware of that. :wink: Good to bring it up again, though, in case I missed it.

Marine vegetation does not include as much C14 as it is not exposed to air, and hence organisms whose diet consists mostly of seafood or things which eat seafood themselves won't give a good C14 reading - they contain less C14 than those which get their C14 from terrestrial vegetation and such give a C14 reading which is too old. So don't be surprised when you come across websites announcing that e.g. live mollusks were carbon dated to be thousands of years old - that's not a surprise at all, C14 doesn't work with marine life for the aforementioned known reason. That doesn't affect the validity of the methodology for terrestrial life.

Ok. Thanks. So a 'fish' which feeds on deep sea organisms low in C14 will also have a low C14 rating? Then if those 'fish' with low C14 amounts in them were consumed as the entire diet of a type of bird, that bird would then have a low C14 quantity in it, too, right? Then if that bird was consumed as the entire diet of a land-dwelling creature, that land-dwelling creature would have low amounts of C14 in it, too, I would think. Is this scenario theoretically possible, and if so, are my conclusions fairly accurate?

C14 typically decays by beta emission (emitting a positron, the positively charged antimatter counterpart of an electron). I'm not aware of any instance of observed proton emission from C14. It may occur, but it's negligible.

How negligible?

Roughly 78% of the air which we breathe consists of N14 It's the most common isotope of nitrogen, pretty much all the nitrogen in your body is N14.

And it's not possible for that N14 in your body to be turned into C14? Can't radiation from an atomic bomb, perhaps, help to turn N14 into C14? So Mr. Radioactive Man would appear to be much younger than he really is? :-D Seriously, I'd like to know. ;)

 

[jwu]

Ok. Thanks. So a 'fish' which feeds on deep sea organisms low in C14 will also have a low C14 rating? Then if those 'fish' with low C14 amounts in them were consumed as the entire diet of a type of bird, that bird would then have a low C14 quantity in it, too, right? Then if that bird was consumed as the entire diet of a land-dwelling creature, that land-dwelling creature would have low amounts of C14 in it, too, I would think. Is this scenario theoretically possible, and if so, are my conclusions fairly accurate?

Yep, i think so.

How negligible?

It's not part of the usual decay mode listing of C14:
http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/ ... C-pg2.html

While it may be theoretically possible, it apparently happens only extremely rarely. Keep in mind that it also would require the presence of ionized protons. Unlike neutrons these are charged particles and catch electrons, and there isn't strong enough radiation on ground level for them to form in situ as the neutrons in the upper atmosphere do.

And it's not possible for that N14 in your body to be turned into C14? Can't radiation from an atomic bomb, perhaps, help to turn N14 into C14? So Mr. Radioactive Man would appear to be much younger than he really is? Seriously, I'd like to know.

Technically yes, but it takes neutron radiation at a very specific energy level for this. Moreover, e.g. breeder reactors make use of this effect but it takes them a while to convert the original isotope to the desired one, even though they are designed for maximal output.

A millisecond flash of too-high-energy neutron radiation isn't going to affect much of the N14 in the body...but i guess it would be measurable.

 

[Salazar]

Exactly the same thing that causes it in any other location (except cores of supernovas or other absolutely extreme conditions): The own instability of the isotope. This is not affected by different outside conditions as they appear on earth, and it's a statistically predictable process. While we cannot tell when one particular atom will decay, we can safely say that out of some million or billion half of them will have decayed away after a certain duration (5740 years in case of C14), with only a very small deviation.

Nuclear decay is not in any measurable way affected by conditions which occur on earth.

No, sorry, I cannot debate dating methods with you since I am not at all informed about it. What I can say, however is that there have been many dinosaur bones dug up that have not mineralized/fossilized. So your opening statement is off base, I believe.

http://creationwiki.org/Unfossilized_dinosaur_bones

 

[jwu]

No, sorry, I cannot debate dating methods with you since I am not at all informed about it. What I can say, however is that there have been many dinosaur bones dug up that have not mineralized/fossilized. So your opening statement is off base, I believe.

Quite the contrary - that makes them even more prone to contamination as they still have a porous structure which basically invites things to leak in, in contrast to mineralized ones which are comparatively "closed" and "filled".
And bone matter itself does not contain any carbon, it consists of calcium compounds of which carbon is not a part. Bones mostly consist of calcium phosphate such as Ca3(PO4)2 and hydroxylapatite, Ca10(PO4)6(OH)2

So if carbon is found there, it is quite probably not part of the actual bone matter.

From the creationwiki article:

Both the dinosaur and woody materials have been dated by Carbon-14, and the dates obtained are between 9,800 and 50,000 years. The following links provide more information and documentation.

[emphasis mine]
A C14 reading of 50,000 years is synonymous to "no measurable carbon left" and it actually means "the sample is 50,000 years old or older" - this can be any age of at least 50,000 years.

This demonstrates the deceptiveness of that website - it makes it appear as if 50,000 years was an inexplicable bad result, albeit that is exactly what one would expect of samples which are millions of years old if one understands how C14 works. And it takes only a tiny bit of contamination of in situ production to make an otherwise C14 dead sample appear as e.g. 35,000 years old - only 1/64 of the original C14 has to leak into it. For 40,000 years only 1/128 of the original content has to leak into it, and so on.

Radiometric dating is not perfect, occasionally bad results do occur - no-one denies that. Just like radar traps occasionally measure tractors or bikes at 200mph. But that doesn't mean that they don't work in general, the vast majority of results falls well in line with expectations. Critics of these methods usually are reluctant to talk about that and point out a few recurring flawed results instead (they seem to have a limited repertoire of about two dozen cases, which are contrasted by hundreds of thousands or even millions of results which fall well in line with expectations). As previously mentioned, i have yet to see a creationist even try to explain the above correlation of dating results - but if the dating methods are flawed there shouldn't be a correlation between the results of independent methods, they should vary wildly instead.

An interesting thing about the bad results which get pointed out is that these are usually cases of too young dates - with there being evidence of the actual sample being older than what the instruments said. This doesn't really help their case, as they need to find a reason why the vast majority of measurements gives results which are actually older than they should be according to their own ideas.
I'm aware of only a handful of cases where the results were too old for the sample, all of them are well understood.
E.g. i've already mentioned the mollusks. Another case is potassium argon dating of lava of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
Potassium decays rather slowly, hence it takes a long time for a measurable amount of it to decay away. This means that methods based on this have a limited accuracy, there is an inevitable error of hundreds of thousands of years. This is just fine for samples which are many millions of years old, but some people submitted a young sample from Mt. St. Helens to a laboratory which uses this method and which says that samples younger than 2 million years won't give good results exactly because of the too large relative error.

The sample eventually was dated to be about 250,000 years old - which is well in the range of what results one would expect, after all a few hundred thousand years of error are common due to the specific method used. In other words, a good result wasn't even expected except as by pure luck. This however was misrepresented as a spectacular failure of the dating method -
"20 years old sample dated to be 250,000 years old" makes a nice headline, but when one considers that the dating method used is known to have an error range of +-500,000 or so years, this becomes pure deception.

 

[Salazar]

[emphasis mine]
A C14 reading of 50,000 years is synonymous to "no measurable carbon left" and it actually means "the sample is 50,000 years old or older" - this can be any age of at least 50,000 years.

This demonstrates the deceptiveness of that website - it makes it appear as if 50,000 years was an inexplicable bad result, albeit that is exactly what one would expect of samples which are millions of years old if one understands how C14 works. And it takes only a tiny bit of contamination of in situ production to make an otherwise C14 dead sample appear as e.g. 35,000 years old - only 1/64 of the original C14 has to leak into it. For 40,000 years only 1/128 of the original content has to leak into it, and so on.

hi jwu....

Ok -- what about this one which I posted earlier...it does not mention the 50,000 year barrier, I don't believe...so are you just hanging on the hopes that the tests are flawed?

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/15


In 1990, samples of various dinosaur bones were submitted for Carbon-14 dating to the University of Arizona’s department of geosciences’ laboratory of isotope geochemistry. Bones from an Allosaurus and an Acrocanthosaurus were among those sent to the university’s testing facilities to undergo a “blind†dating procedure (which means that the technicians performing the tests did not know that the bones had come from dinosaurs). Not realizing that the samples were from dinosaurs prevented “evolutionary bias,†and helped ensure that the results were as accurate as possible (within the recognized assumptions and limits of the C-14 dating method). We have in our possessionâ€â€on the official stationery of the University of Arizonaâ€â€a copy of the test results for the Allosaurus bones (see reproduction at right, sample B). Amazingly, the oldest C-14 date assigned to those bones was a mere 16,120 years (and only 23,760 years for the Acrocanthosaurus fossils; see Dahmer, et al., 1990). Both dates are a far cry from the millions of years that evolutionists suggest should be assigned to dinosaur fossils.

Radiometric dating is not perfect, occasionally bad results do occur - no-one denies that. Just like radar traps occasionally measure tractors or bikes at 200mph. But that doesn't mean that they don't work in general, the vast majority of results falls well in line with expectations. Critics of these methods usually are reluctant to talk about that and point out a few recurring flawed results instead (they seem to have a limited repertoire of about two dozen cases, which are contrasted by hundreds of thousands or even millions of results which fall well in line with expectations). As previously mentioned, i have yet to see a creationist even try to explain the above correlation of dating results - but if the dating methods are flawed there shouldn't be a correlation between the results of independent methods, they should vary wildly instead.

Well you may be right....it seems to me that all dating methods are probably imperfect. Would you agree that mtDNA testing is probably imperfect on Neanderthals as well??

An interesting thing about the bad results which get pointed out is that these are usually cases of too young dates - with there being evidence of the actual sample being older than what the instruments said. This doesn't really help their case, as they need to find a reason why the vast majority of measurements gives results which are actually older than they should be according to their own ideas.
I'm aware of only a handful of cases where the results were too old for the sample, all of them are well understood.
E.g. i've already mentioned the mollusks. Another case is potassium argon dating of lava of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.
Potassium decays rather slowly, hence it takes a long time for a measurable amount of it to decay away. This means that methods based on this have a limited accuracy, there is an inevitable error of hundreds of thousands of years. This is just fine for samples which are many millions of years old, but some people submitted a young sample from Mt. St. Helens to a laboratory which uses this method and which says that samples younger than 2 million years won't give good results exactly because of the too large relative error.

The sample eventually was dated to be about 250,000 years old - which is well in the range of what results one would expect, after all a few hundred thousand years of error are common due to the specific method used. In other words, a good result wasn't even expected except as by pure luck. This however was misrepresented as a spectacular failure of the dating method -
"20 years old sample dated to be 250,000 years old" makes a nice headline, but when one considers that the dating method used is known to have an error range of +-500,000 or so years, this becomes pure deception.

thanks for the info....sorry I cannot discuss this more with you due to a lack on knowledge about the subject.

 

[jwu]

hi jwu....

Ok -- what about this one which I posted earlier...it does not mention the 50,000 year barrier, I don't believe...so are you just hanging on the hopes that the tests are flawed?

http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/15

As previously said, occasionally bad results do occur, and sometimes the actual reasons cannot be determined. I explained a variety of possible things why these results could have been put off, as well as evidence which indicates that they were skewed: most bone matter does not contain C14, so if one finds C14 in it then it quite clearly got there by contamination as one wouldn't expect it there in a young sample either. Without further details about the actual incident (how long the samples were exposed to air, how they were cleaned and so on) we can only speculate though.

If 99 out of 100 measurements say that something is old and one says that it is young, then it's quite a safe bet that something went wrong with the single disagreeing measurement.

But even if nothing went wrong, what would this demonstrate? That some dinosaurs survived until a few ten thousand years ago.
If a few bad results are supposed to demonstrate flaws in the dating method in a way that is supposed to cast doubts onto its other results, then these results still have to be explained. In other words, one would trade one minor anomaly (a few bad results, nothing surprising) for a much bigger anomaly (hundreds of thousands of results showing a pattern of consistency and agreement despite of flaws in the dating method). What would you consider more likely?

The first to find a good explanation (other than "they work!") for the correlation of very most results of radiometric dating methods with each other and other independent dating methods will earn a Nobel prize...

The 50.000 years limit is real.
Only recently advanced measuring instruments pushed that limit a bit further, 65.000 years methinks. These new instruments are rarely used though (it's expensive), and usually for more precise dating of younger samples; in case of samples at the upper end of the scale the whole method is not very accurate either as these are then extremely sensitive to contamination. After all, something that is 65.000 years old can get a 5000 years error by only 1/8th of the contamination that will put a 50.000 years sample off by the same amount.

Well you may be right....it seems to me that all dating methods are probably imperfect. Would you agree that mtDNA testing is probably imperfect on Neanderthals as well??

Nothing in science is perfect, just some things are more certain than others.
The mtDNA testing isn't perfect either of course...but it's far from being just a guess but it establishes a result with a probability of like 99+%
Sure, there is a possibility that the method failed in this case - but i won't put my money on that chance.

thanks for the info....sorry I cannot discuss this more with you due to a lack on knowledge about the subject.

It's an opportunity to learn ;) I had to look up many things which i posted as well.

 

[Salazar]

Jwu...when you put the dinosaur carbon dating test results with the fact that dinosaurs have been dug up with soft tissue attached, it makes you really wonder how old dinosaurs really are.

http://www.synthstuff.com/mt/archives/t ... sue-01.jpg

Also, dinosaurs have been depicted in artwork throughout ancient history. The puzzle, when you put the pieces together, form a picture that contradicts what science says about the ages of dinosaurs. And you know what that means, don't you? If the ages of dinosaurs are incorrect, then then the whole uniformitarian view must be abandoned.

 

[jwu]

Jwu...when you put the dinosaur carbon dating test results with the fact that dinosaurs have been dug up with soft tissue attached, it makes you really wonder how old dinosaurs really are.

Two carbon dating results which can have been flawed for a number of reasons which i explained and which are opposed by thousands other dating results - let's not forget the context.


Moreover, if dinosaurs were not as old as we think, why doesn't that happen more often? Why is it such an exceptionally rare thing that something that looks like soft tissue (it was dehydrated by the way, and only rehydrated by solutions which removed the surrounding mineral components). Moreover, fossil tissue and nucleated cells were found before in cases in which the original material was not preserved, so we cannot even know for sure if it even is the original material.(Schweitzer et al. 2005; Stokstad 2005)
The specific bone in question was exceptionally well preserved. It's a really cool find, but nothing that makes conventional science break a sweat.

Also, dinosaurs have been depicted in artwork throughout ancient history. The puzzle, when you put the pieces together, form a picture that contradicts what science says about the ages of dinosaurs.

Like what? Ica stones? Most of them are fakes...that's what you get when poor people learn that they can make money with selling such stones...
Certain petroglyphs which look like someone scratched something into a rock using a bad dinosaur textbook as a template? A bad textbook because the depicted dinosaur couldn't possibly have stood in that position without a broken neck (the same applies to many ica stone depictions)? And those petroglyphs are highly ambiguous and could just as well depict anything...e.g. one that is showing something similar to a t-rex could just as well show a standing bird.

There is just a single depiction which i find impressive, a carving on some far eastern temple wall. However, just like we know how steganosaurs look, the people who made that carving could have incidentally dug up a well preserved fossil of it and made their own ideas about it. After all, if one finds something like the fossil seen on the image below, then it doesn't take a 21st century palentologist to get a superficial idea about how the creature might have looked like when it was alive:

If the ages of dinosaurs are incorrect, then then the whole uniformitarian view must be abandoned.

No...all that this would demonstrate that the age of some dinosaur fossils is less than expected and that maybe some of them survived until rather recently.
Compressing the entire tertiary and quarternary into a few thousand years is not an option as these strata contain way too many features which take very very long to form (e.g. limestones grow at a pace of millimetres per decade, yet we find hundreds of metres thick layers of it), and of course the accepted ages are supported by the vast majority of dating results. Why don't we find any dinosaur fossils above the K/T boundary?

If you can provide a consistent framework of explanations which explains all these things, then please show it to me.

 

[Salazar]

JWU: Two carbon dating results which can have been flawed for a number of reasons

As can ALL dating methods.

Moreover, if dinosaurs were not as old as we think, why doesn't that happen more often?

probably because scientists don't look....I'm starting to learn that science often does not like to expose any evidence that contradicts their theory.

The specific bone in question was exceptionally well preserved.

65 million years? Think about it.


It's a really cool find, but nothing that makes conventional science break a sweat.

Now that is funny. In reality there is a huge sweat over it.

Like what? Ica stones? Most of them are fakes...that's what you get when poor people learn that they can make money with selling such stones...

The original ica stones were not fakes. Besides, all it takes is one valid depiction from around the globe to shatter 100 years of uniformitarian science. Dinosaur bones are supposed to be old because of their location in the earth....but if this location means nothing, then the whole theory must be scrapped.

There is just a single depiction which i find impressive, a carving on some far eastern temple wall. However, just like we know how steganosaurs look, the people who made that carving could have incidentally dug up a well preserved fossil of it and made their own ideas about it.

That sounds very fishy....and not likely -- especially if it happens over and over and over.

Salazar: "If the ages of dinosaurs are incorrect, then then the whole uniformitarian view must be abandoned."


No...all that this would demonstrate that the age of some dinosaur fossils is less than expected and that maybe some of them survived until rather recently.

C'mmon, my friend -- every textbook ever written would have to be burned. Everything science thought it knew would be turned on its head.

 

[jwu]

As can ALL dating methods.

Of course - but when hundreds of thousands of agreeing results stand against a few dozen odd ones, then i know where to put my money.

Either way there is an anomaly. You want me to explain the few odd ones. I want you to explain the hundreds of thousands of good (from my perspective) ones.

probably because scientists don't look....I'm starting to learn that science often does not like to expose any evidence that contradicts their theory.

Quite the contrary! In science the best way to get famous is to overturn accepted theories. E.g. as Einstein did.
If there is a flaw in a methodology, there will be tons of scientists who gladly point it out. It's a damn good way to gain reputation. The evidence which is supposed to overturn accepted theories has to be watertight though, and it will be put under a lot of scrutiny.

Or are you suggesting that there is some sort of atheist conspiracy?

65 million years? Think about it.

That's an appeal to big numbers. Do you have any qualifications to judge whether things can get preserved for that long? I don't think so.

The whole issue has been studied...this wasn't the first time that soft things were found inside fossils:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/flesh.html

Now that is funny. In reality there is a huge sweat over it.

That's what creationist websites want to make you believe. Just like any rare find some papers are being written about it and it is closely investigated, but hardly anyone considers this to be a threat for the current models.

The original ica stones were not fakes. Besides, all it takes is one valid depiction from around the globe to shatter 100 years of uniformitarian science. Dinosaur bones are supposed to be old because of their location in the earth....but if this location means nothing, then the whole theory must be scrapped.

It takes one observed dinosaur to shatter the idea that dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, that's all. And something that looks roughly like a dinosaur is not sufficient evidence of that. As previously mentioned, just like today's paleontologists those people can have gotten a pretty good idea about how those creatures could have looked like by looking at a skeleton.

That sounds very fishy....and not likely -- especially if it happens over and over and over.

Does it? How many instances of such are there? We can go through them one by one...

C'mmon, my friend -- every textbook ever written would have to be burned. Everything science thought it knew would be turned on its head.

Let us assume that there were live dinosaurs 1000 years ago. What would have to be changed, other than the apparent extinction being removed from the textbooks? Please be specific and give reasons.

 

[samuel]

Wonder if the possibility of the earth being covered with water? could explain the discrepancies.

By the way take a look at this thread I started elsewhere.

http://www.christianforums.net/viewtopic.php?t=26422

 

[jwu]

What would explain the discrepancy of the floodwater? (There are plenty more falsifications of a global flood though, such as desert sandstones, evaporites, paleosols, termites which happily built nests during the supposed deluge and so on)

That is the single pictures that i was talking about earlier...but still, nothing dramatic. As previously explained, people can easily get their own ideas about how a stegosaurus looked like just by looking at a well preserved skeleton. And even if they saw a live one, this wouldn't have any significant impact - all it'd show that some of them survived for longer than previously thought.

Other alternatives are the panel on which the depiction is found being a hoax, which is indicated by it being of a lighter color than any of the surrounding panels.
Or it depicts a rhinoceros and what looks like the armor plates of a stegosaurus is just an artistic decoration which is supposed to fill blank space - decorations just like that are found all over the carving, it's a common theme on it, the snake depictions which form those circles around the other carvings have such armor plates or whatever it is supposed to be as well:

It's notable that the head of the depicted creature is way too large for a stegosaurus, and it's lacking the characteristic tail spikes as well.
http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/ ... eleton.gif

 

[samuel]

I would not argue that seeing a well preserved skeleton of an animal, could reveal something of what it looked like. But this does point to the possibility of a visual record, making these animals a lot less older than the claims of science.

Personally I don’t let such things concern me, this is only a what if thing. I think we have to split believers?? - into two groups those who believe by simple God given faith, and those who try to mix science with a more complex man developed type of faith.

I think personally you have to believe the Bible, and disqualify the other, or try to mix both, and disqualify yourself. This is the reason I stated in the first post I normally don’t even go here.

 

[Barbarian]

I would not argue that seeing a well preserved skeleton of an animal, could reveal something of what it looked like.

In fact, we know that the popular depiction of dragons is based on the fossil skull of an extince giraffe, which was displayed in an ancient Greek museum as a dragon skull. Not surprisingly, it looks like our conception of a dragon skull. Likewise the griffin was the result of Central Asian people finding the fossils of early ceratopsians.

But this does point to the possibility of a visual record, making these animals a lot less older than the claims of science.

Since we know it happens from fossil finds, and since the evidence clearly shows these died millions of years ago, the conclusion is obvious.

Personally I don’t let such things concern me, this is only a what if thing. I think we have to split believers?? - into two groups those who believe by simple God given faith, and those who try to mix science with a more complex man developed type of faith.

It's why most Christians don't accept YE creationism. It was invented in the 20th century by Seventh-Day adventists, who proslytized it as scientific religion, labeled as "Flood Geology", later relabeled as "Scientific Creationism." This man-developed faith was successfully spread by men like Henry Morris.

I think personally you have to believe the Bible, and disqualify the other, or try to mix both, and disqualify yourself.

Me too. Since Genesis explicitly refutes the "life ex nihilo" claims of the YE creationists, it is not a doctrine consistent with Christian faith.

 

[samuel]

If you have ever watched any of the programs on Discovery channel, or the others like it. It becomes pretty obvious they are working hard to disprove God, or any divine creation. They remind me of those Paul described in Rom. 1: 18-23, who not wanting to accept God created themselves their own view of things.

The Bible gives no record of such things because this is not its purpose. And I am sure if it was any benefit to us God would have revealed it to us.

Those who hold to such ridiculous ideas as evolution, are fooling themselves. It is not possible for single celled animals to have had the intelligence to create perfect multiple celled creations, this takes a great intelligence and a creator - like God. If evolution were true things would be in a constant state of change, nothing would remain the same. But since all things remain the same, this further proves creation, and a divine plan.

 

[jwu]

If you have ever watched any of the programs on Discovery channel, or the others like it. It becomes pretty obvious they are working hard to disprove God, or any divine creation.

Then how come most Christians worldwide are theistic evolutionists?

The Bible gives no record of such things because this is not its purpose. And I am sure if it was any benefit to us God would have revealed it to us.

The Bible doesn't speak of electricity or computers either.

It is not possible for single celled animals to have had the intelligence to create perfect multiple celled creations, this takes a great intelligence and a creator - like God.

Evolution does not propose the emergence of perfect multicellular organisms from single celled ones.
The evolution of multicellular organisms from single celled ones has been directly observed though.

If evolution were true things would be in a constant state of change, nothing would remain the same.

We do observe a lot of change going on, both directly and past change by genetic and fossil evidence.
There are a few cases of stable niches - but these actually are the vast minority.

What would it take to convince you that evolution is a viable theory?

 

[samuel]

The Bible gives no record of such things because this is not its purpose. And I am sure if it was any benefit to us God would have revealed it to us.

This is the basis I would accept, and this on only.

Then how come most Christians worldwide are theistic evolutionists?

I would have to question such faith, you cannot have both. You have to stand firm on one or the other, you cant compromise faith in God.

 

[jwu]

This is the basis I would accept, and this on only.

So you don't accept atomic theory, germ theory and so on either?

I would have to question such faith, you cannot have both. You have to stand firm on one or the other, you cant compromise faith in God.

A literal interpretation of Genesis is not a requirement for having faith in God...different interpretations are viable too.

But exactly this black and white attitude is quite a threat to many Christians. I've seen many being convinced by the evidence against a literal Genesis and for evolution which then lost their faith completely as they were indoctrinated that a literal Genesis is a requirement for being a Christian.