Age of the Earth.

[johnhanks]

Ever since I have known you, you have been touting evolution, that is a bias. If you didn't accept evolution, you wouldn't be touting it. If you accepted creation you would be touting creation, that is what I am talking about.

So, at last, there we have it. MoF's notion of debate is that any evaluation of evidence in a particular direction is indistinguishable from bias. Quality of evidence, quantity of evidence, all irrelevant: if you've weighed the evidence and come to any conclusion at all, you're biased. Forget Newton: he failed to give equal consideration to the possibility that instead of two masses attracting each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them, they were actually being pushed together by angels; he was therefore biased, and nothing he concluded has any validity at all.

 

[Man of Faith]

So, at last, there we have it. MoF's notion of debate is that any evaluation of evidence in a particular direction is indistinguishable from bias. Quality of evidence, quantity of evidence, all irrelevant: if you've weighed the evidence and come to any conclusion at all, you're biased. Forget Newton: he failed to give equal consideration to the possibility that instead of two masses attracting each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them, they were actually being pushed together by angels; he was therefore biased, and nothing he concluded has any validity at all.

When it comes to something that can't be proven either way, such as evolution vs creation, or whether there is a God or not, then that is true.

 

[Willamena]

So, at last, there we have it. MoF's notion of debate is that any evaluation of evidence in a particular direction is indistinguishable from bias. Quality of evidence, quantity of evidence, all irrelevant: if you've weighed the evidence and come to any conclusion at all, you're biased. Forget Newton: he failed to give equal consideration to the possibility that instead of two masses attracting each other with a force proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them, they were actually being pushed together by angels; he was therefore biased, and nothing he concluded has any validity at all.

It's okay, you can address your post to MoF. He's sitting right there, and he can hear you. ->

 

[fantome profane]

It's okay, you can address your post to MoF. He's sitting right there, and he can hear you. ->

I’m not convinced he can.

 

[johnhanks]

It's okay, you can address your post to MoF. He's sitting right there, and he can hear you. ->

Are you sure? I could have sworn he was on my left.

 

[johnhanks]

When it comes to something that can't be proven either way, such as evolution vs creation, or whether there is a God or not, then that is true.

I'm sure many people have explained to you that proof forms no part of science. Science can deal only in evidence and falsifiability. In the first of your examples, there are mountains of evidence supporting evolution, and mountains pointing to the falsity of special creation.

The second of your examples falls entirely outside the remit of science.

 

[Man of Faith]

Now let's get on with it. I am here to convince people that the earth is young. That is one of my main community service jobs on this forum. I do it completely without pay, because I care about people.

Moon dust - Scientists were convinced that the astronauts would sink into a sea of moon dust because over millions of years it should have had dust of hundreds of feet thick. But when they landed, they found out that it was a young moon and the dust wasn't that thick.

 

[johnhanks]

Now let's get on with it. I am here to convince people that the earth is young. That is one of my main community service jobs on this forum. I do it completely without pay, because I care about people.

You're not being paid? OMG, MoF, get onto your union pronto. The rest of us are getting $10 a post, guaranteed cash on the nail; and 10c a frubal as bonus. Keep up, for frig's sake.

Moon dust - Scientists were convinced that the astronauts would sink into a sea of moon dust because over millions of years it should have had dust of hundreds of feet thick. But when they landed, they found out that it was a young moon and the dust wasn't that thick.

Moon dust .

 

[Willamena]

Moon dust - Scientists were convinced that the astronauts would sink into a sea of moon dust because over millions of years it should have had dust of hundreds of feet thick. But when they landed, they found out that it was a young moon and the dust wasn't that thick.

Sounds more like a '50s sitcom plot.

 

[The_Evelyonian]

Another one for the moon dust crowd.

Moon Dust

 

[fantome profane]

Moon dust - Scientists were convinced that the astronauts would sink into a sea of moon dust because over millions of years it should have had dust of hundreds of feet thick. But when they landed, they found out that it was a young moon and the dust wasn't that thick.

[timewarp]
(This is from another post of my in another thread 2 and a half years ago)
This I have to say is my all time favourite creationist argument. I want to thank you for bringing it up, very few people do anymore. It is an excellent example of how some creationists deliberately misrepresent information in the hopes that people listening will be uninformed and might actually fall for it. I say some creationists, because not all creationists are actually this unethical.

For example Answers in Genesis actually has a page that lists some of the more ridiculous arguments used by other creationists, and this is one of them.

For a long time, creationists claimed that the dust layer on the moon was too thin if dust had truly been falling on it for billions of years. They based this claim on early estimates—by evolutionists—of the influx of moon dust, and worries that the moon landers would sink into this dust layer. But these early estimates were wrong, and by the time of the Apollo landings, NASA was not worried about sinking. So the dust layer thickness can’t be used as proof of a young moon (or of an old one, either). See Moon-dust argument no longer useful and Moon dust and the age of the solar system (Technical).

Another interesting Christian creationist site gives us some greater detail of this misleading argument.

more accurate measurements give the value of about 23,000 tons per year.2 These measurements also agree with levels of meteoritic dust levels trapped in sediments on Earth (an independent cross-check.).3 For the moon the annual accumulation of dust would be 11 thousand tons. This quantity would produce 1.2 inches of dust for a moon 4.5 billion years old. When other factors, such as decomposition from ultraviolet radiation, other sources of erosion, and impact of larger interplanetary objects, are considered 2.5 inches of dust would be produced on the moon in 4.25 billion years, which is very close to the age determined by other methods.

The fact is that NASA was not expecting any more than a couple of inches of dust on the moon, and this is in fact that they found. It is also a fact that given the more accurate figures of accumulations the amount of dust found on the moon indicates an age for the moon of approximately 4.25 – 4.5billion years (just slightly younger than the earth), and this figure is matched by radio reactive dating of several moon rocks.

This article from talkorigin, which I have already quoted, goes into greater detail of the kind of techniques that creationists use. Twice Henry Morris reversed the digits on dates to make it seem that references he cited were more recent than they actually were (honest mistake? Perhaps, but twice and always in his favour?) Not to mention misquoting those sources and inaccurate calculations to make it seem as if the amount of dust on the moon indicated a young age when in fact it indicates the opposite.

Thus, the very latest, and possibly the best, cosmic dust influx measurement dooms the creationist argument once again. (How many strikes does it take before you're out in creationland? Answer: Who knows? They play by no rules and have no referees.) In summary, the general scientific consensus, going back to the 1960s, has been borne out by numerous measurements during the last 25 years.
Perhaps these constant reminders about obsolete data finally got to Henry Morris. Yet, he did not drop the cosmic dust argument like a hot potato, as one might expect. To the contrary, his second edition of Scientific Creationism (1985) expanded his footnote reference to Pettersson to suggest that a much more recent source from NASA gave an even larger influx of dust! The reader was referred to: "G.S. Hawkins, Ed., Meteor Orbits and Dust, published by NASA, 1976" (Wheeler, 1987, p.14). Thus, Morris appeared to have an unimpeachable source which was even more recent than Dohnanyi's figure!
Frank Lovell, suspecting that years of direct measurement from space (supported by sea floor studies) could not be that wrong, smelling a rat as it were, checked up on the source. It turned out that the actual date was 1967! The digits had been reversed (Wheeler, 1987, pp.14-15). Furthermore, the figure quoted by Morris (200 million tons of dust each year) was not given in the original source! It was a calculation based on the original source, done by an unnamed "creationist physicist" who botched it! The unsuspecting reader would have assumed that the rate had the official blessing of NASA. Astronomer Larry W. Esposito had some choice words concerning this incredible fiasco by Henry Morris:
...the work is incorrectly cited, outdated, from a non-referenced symposium publication, based on unreliable data. The calculation multiplies together unrelated numbers: the product of these factors is not a reliable estimation of the current cosmic dust deposition rate.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Wheeler and Lovell were party to another strange, creationist tale of reversed digits! They had written a letter to a religious magazine, Concern, published in Louisville, Kentucky, and had criticized an article which had used Pettersson's obsolete figure for cosmic dust influx. Concern published that letter along with a reply from the author of the original article. The author stated that Richard Bliss (a member of the Institute for Creation Research) had written the following to him in a letter:
It seems that we have estimates on meteor dust deposition, based on various assumptions, of the total volume of incoming meteoritic material ranging from 800,000 to 1 x 106 tons per day. You can get this information from the following sources:
1. Space Handbook, Astronautics and its Applications by R.W. Beucherin and staff of the Rand Corporation, Random House, NY 1959.
2. Nazarove, I.N. Rocket and Satellite Investigations of Meteors presented at the fifth meeting of the COMITE Speciale De I'annee Geophysique International, Moscow, August 1985.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
The first source was even more obsolete than Pettersson's, but the second one was dated 1985. In response to a query, Bliss said that he got the figures from Harold Slusher, also of ICR. Several attempts to get through to Slusher failed.
Finally it occurred to us that the date cited for this reference, like that of Morris, might be incorrect. The International Geophysical Year ("I'annee Geophysique International") was 1957-1958, and I found in Nature [182:294 (1958)] that the fifth meeting of the Special Committee was held in Moscow in July-August 1958, and that it included a symposium on the rocket and satellite program; this obviously was the source of Slusher's reference.
(Wheeler, 1987, p.15)
Thus, we have a second case of inverted digits! A complaint about obsolete data was answered with data even more obsolete!! The average reader, of course, would never have guessed that the citation was bogus.

But I hope that you will check into some of this stuff for your self and that you will learn to be a bit more skeptical even of those people you respect. We are all human and we err, both factually and ethically.
[/timewarp]


What I love about this argument (and this is the me from today speaking now) is that we have refuting evidence coming not only from “evolutionist” sites but also coming from young earth creationists sites and old earth creationists sites. It is just amazing to me that anyone still accepts this kind of nonsense.


(what can I say, another one bites the dust)

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

Of course it has already been pointed out that all dating methods assume three things, what the conditions were like at time zero, there was no contamination, and a constant decay rate.

Not so. In fact, many dating methods do not use radiometry at all.

Seeing how this is a thread that includes "other possible evidence" of the age of the earth, I feel free to post some of the YEC evidence. Let me know if I am out of line on this, I don't want to hijack the thread.

Exponential decay in the earth's magnetic field (half-life of 1400-2000 years). This half-life can't be extrapolated back more than about 10,000 years without the field becoming intolerably powerful.

Sure... if it continued exponentially. In reality, the Earth's magnetic field flips fairly frequently, giving us another mechanism that helps us figure out the age of the Earth (or rather, a lower bound for the age of the Earth): geomagnetic reversals. These can be seen in both the seafloor (thanks to seafloor spreading) and igneous rocks on land.

As a side note, since the crystals of igneous rocks are aligned with the direction of the Earth's magnetic field when they were first formed, this gives us an excellent indicator for the timing of continental drift.

The seafloor is constantly being created at the mid-ocean ridges and being destroyed at the subduction zones at the continental plate boundaries, so sea floor is much newer than the planet as a whole. Still, the oldest sections of sea floor that exist today are 200 million years old, so that gives a hard (no pun intended) lower limit to any age of the Earth.

Also, the sea floor holds a record of about 200 geomagnetic reversals. This is only one every million years or so by conventional science, which doesn't really create any issues. However, if the age of the Earth is only 6000 years and you tried to cram all those reversals into that short span of time, you'd have to come up with some explanation for how the poles could flip every 30 years on average (at minimum!) without anybody ever noticing this happen ever in the 2000-odd years since the invention of the magnetic compass.

 

[Man of Faith]

[timewarp]
(This is from another post of my in another thread 2 and a half years ago)
This I have to say is my all time favourite creationist argument. I want to thank you for bringing it up, very few people do anymore. It is an excellent example of how some creationists deliberately misrepresent information in the hopes that people listening will be uninformed and might actually fall for it. I say some creationists, because not all creationists are actually this unethical.

For example Answers in Genesis actually has a page that lists some of the more ridiculous arguments used by other creationists, and this is one of them.
Another interesting Christian creationist site gives us some greater detail of this misleading argument.
The fact is that NASA was not expecting any more than a couple of inches of dust on the moon, and this is in fact that they found. It is also a fact that given the more accurate figures of accumulations the amount of dust found on the moon indicates an age for the moon of approximately 4.25 – 4.5billion years (just slightly younger than the earth), and this figure is matched by radio reactive dating of several moon rocks.

This article from talkorigin, which I have already quoted, goes into greater detail of the kind of techniques that creationists use. Twice Henry Morris reversed the digits on dates to make it seem that references he cited were more recent than they actually were (honest mistake? Perhaps, but twice and always in his favour?) Not to mention misquoting those sources and inaccurate calculations to make it seem as if the amount of dust on the moon indicated a young age when in fact it indicates the opposite.
But I hope that you will check into some of this stuff for your self and that you will learn to be a bit more skeptical even of those people you respect. We are all human and we err, both factually and ethically.
[/timewarp]


What I love about this argument (and this is the me from today speaking now) is that we have refuting evidence coming not only from “evolutionist” sites but also coming from young earth creationists sites and old earth creationists sites. It is just amazing to me that anyone still accepts this kind of nonsense.


(what can I say, another one bites the dust)

See I'm a reasoned person and will drop that argument. When I see evidence that makes sense I have no problem abandoning an argument.

 

[fantome profane]

See I'm a reasoned person and will drop that argument. When I see evidence that makes sense I have no problem abandoning an argument.

This may be the first time on this forum that I have frubaled you. Well deserved.

Now we need to see you drop that nonsense about the magnetic field as well. And then we can go from there.

 

[The Voice of Reason]

What make you think creationists understand radiometric dating?

Easy. They clearly understand all of the shortcomings of radiometric dating because they argue in support of the conclusion that he wants to reach.

Sheesh, gnostic. I would have thought that you could see that one coming from a mile away.

 

[The Voice of Reason]

I interpret all data in a YEC worldview and it fits.

Of course, one has to use a shoehorn, a strong anasthetic, two blindfolds, and an axe to get it to fit, but once the mind goes numb, it actually begins to look like it makes sense.

 

[tumbleweed41]

It is very simple Gabe, it is because of my world view. I look for creation evidence, others look for evolution evidence. I interpret all data in a YEC worldview and it fits.

When you make a logical conclusion from the evidence you are doing that based on your biases, whether you admit it or not.

When it comes to something that can't be proven either way, such as evolution vs creation, or whether there is a God or not, then that is true.

Really MoF. This is beneath even you. You still seem to think this is really about God vs. Evolution. When really it is about keeping science science, and religion religion.
Science does not have a "evolution" world view. For the first 50 yrs most scientists were diametrically opposed to the notion of evolution. Their was no mass conspiracy by atheist science to remove God from mans thoughts.
What occurred was more and more evidence that supported naturalistic evolution was discovered. Rational and reasonable men and women looked at the empirical evidence and concluded that evolution did indeed account for the diversity of species, and further evidence resulted in validation of common descent.
These are scientific facts. If your Answers in Genesis arguments had any scientific validity at all they would be front page news. Published in all science and naturalist periodicals. They are not. Not because of "blacklisting" and "name-calling". But because they have no scientific merit.
Evolution is not about removing God. It is about using the natural evidence to discover our origins.
If one attempts to insert supernatural or metaphysical explanations into science, the entire process is compromised. If one attempts to "prove" a 6,000-10,000 yr old earth by ignoring or discarding verifiable evidence, then you are doing yourself a disservice and promoting ignorance over knowledge.

I do not think you are stupid, but I do believe that you are so entrenched in your belief that science is somehow out to "get" God, and that if one iota of the Bible is not literally true you must discard your entire belief in God, that you are blind to the natural wonders of the universe and abilities that God has given the human race.

Galileo put it best when he said...
“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

 

[Man of Faith]

This may be the first time on this forum that I have frubaled you. Well deserved.

Now we need to see you drop that nonsense about the magnetic field as well. And then we can go from there.

I need more study on that, something doesn't sound right.

 

[9-10ths_Penguin]

I need more study on that, something doesn't sound right.

What's bothering you?

 

[Willamena]

Also, the sea floor holds a record of about 200 geomagnetic reversals. This is only one every million years or so by conventional science...

I thought it was like every 10,000 years or so. Edit: Ah, I read that it was approximately 300,000 years.