Real World Event Discussions
Where do you start?
POSTED BY: citizen
UPDATED: Wednesday, January 8, 2025 02:57
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006 3:04 AM
Quote:Why would scientists falsely claim that the earth is 4.6 Gyr old, if scientific evidence asserts a 3.3 Gyr age, simply because they want to dispute the Creation argument which claims that the earth is ~10,000 years old? Is there something about 3.3 billion years that doesn’t say “old” compared to 10,000, like 4.6 Gyr? To put it another way, 10,000 years is so small that either way it will get lost in the margin of error, so you can’t even calculate a significant difference. This is crazy even for a conspiracy theory, and there’s no way this is true.
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
The only rocks I've ever run into dated over 3.3 billion years are meteorites. Bounce around in space for billions of years and slam into the Earth, at a point in time not more than 3.3 billion years ago.
Just shooting down the scientific communities random assertions which are based on little or nothing but the desire to fit something into their preconceived notions, a very intellectual thing to do. I have no agenda at all. Just telling it as I sees it.
I actually am serious about this. All of the real scientific evidence I have seen supports an Earth which is slightly younger than accepted theory. Academics don't like that because it isn't 'pat' with their pseudo-creationist theory.
I’m sure that there is a lot of bias among scientists concerning Evolution and Creationism. I think that scientists are a little too quick to assert that Macro-Evolution is a fact, and a little to quick to dismiss Intelligent Design sometimes. So bias exists in science as it does everywhere, but the age of Earth is very likely not influenced by any such “pseudo-creationist theory.”
Quote:I thought you said that it was a fact that the earth was 3.3 billion years old?
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
In reality, planets take a long time to cool, even if the Earth and the moon became liquid globs at the same time, which is possible but not certain, they didn't become solid rocks at the same time. I would imagine 4 billion years ago, there was no solid surface of the earth on which to stand. I could be wrong about this, but I looked up those rocks of which you spoke and it said, from metorites, not an indication of the age of the Earth.
One of the rocks that I mentioned was not from meteorites. According to a paper by Dr. Simon A. Wilde et al in Nature they have discovered evidence, not only of a solid crust on the earth 4.4 Gyr ago, but also water on that crust. It says the sample came form sedimentary rock, not meteorites. And this isn’t the only evidence of rocks on the earth older then 3.3 Gyr. [1][2][3]
Now many meteorites found on Earth do date to ~4.6 Gyr, which gives us an upper bound for the age of the Earth. That is where the 4.6 number comes from, not some theory concerning the moon. So we can safely conclude that the earth is probably not any older then 4.6 Gyr and that it is likely that a solid crust and water began to form on the surface 200 million years later. [3]
[1] Evidence from detrital zircons for the existence of continental crust and oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr ago. Nature, January 2001
[2] http://www.esi-topics.com/nhp/2003/march-03-SimonWilde.html
[3] http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006 4:02 PM
Quote:
Originally posted by SevenPercent:
You can't change facts. Facts are what they are. To be sure, they can be interpreted different ways, or be omitted, but the only people trying to 'change' facts are religious zealots.
All three of the quotes given below are given by admitted atheistic, evolutionary-supporting scientists...
biologist Prof. D.M.S. Watson: "Evolution (is) a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible. " [D.M.S. Watson, "Adaptation", Nature, 123:233]
geneticist Prof. Richard Lewontin (note that the italics are in the original, and not added by myself): "We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, the materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." [Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons", The New York Review, Jan. 9, 1997, p. 31]
astrophysicist, Sir Fred Hoyle: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question." [Fred Hoyle, "Engineering and Science" - Nov 1981]["The World Treasury of Physics, Astonomy & Mathematics" ed. by Timothy Ferris - 1991, p. 392]
And in case anyone missed it at the top of this post, all three quotes here are from admitted atheist, evolution-endorsing scientists.
Hoyle as much as admitted that evolution cannot conceivably have happened, yet he still stubbornly follows its tenets, like those before him, because they are not willing to even consider the alternative -- which is creation by an intelligent designer.
On this tangent, Chuck Colson (once an atheist, himself) admitted that the reason that most atheists don't want to even consider that evolution is false is because, by implication, if evolution is false it means there is a sovereign, creator God who made everything. And by implication, if there's a sovereign, creator God who made everything, then we (His creation) are accountable to Him -- and the one thing that mankind does not want is to be accountable to anyone. In Colson's words, mankind wants (more than anything) to have autonomy. If we were created, we have no autonomy, and therefore we will grasp at any straw which tries to show otherwise in an effort to escape responsibility and accountability to the One who made us.
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006 6:43 PM
Quote:
Yes. It really makes a difference. Everything we do in our everyday lives is based on the world as we understand it. If the world is 6,000 that would profoundly change almost all facts about the world as we know it, and thus every action we take would be effected.
i am going to stop there... no need to answer anything else..
So if the world is 6000 years old now? and we don't know it, why aren't you freaking out yet? What if it turns out to be 1,000,000,000,000 years old then why aren't you freaking out yet...
Give me a break! Nothing changes with it!(Nothing in the morality/religious/ethical section of life) You know it as well as I do, the only differene is you don't know it yet...
Everything about man has not come out of certain facts, it has been man who needed to search for these things that has caused him to be who he is...
You're putting the horse before the cart
[quote} All of what we are is the some total of what we know, experience, and understand.
WOW!! Hahahahaha.... oh boy
So, you must value those higher who have experienced more, know more and understand more? They are superior to he who knows little?
Quote:
So profound is this influcence, that it probably exceeds other facts such as whether or not there is a God.
FACTS?! Believing in God is a fact?! What a dry and miserable life...IF God exists then he would have superceeded the life of the earth...so how does knowing the age of the earth superceed asking whehter God exists...you know that there will be no 'evidence' for it...don't you?
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If someone imposes an unnatural belief system that limits what we understand, we are definitely less for it.
you are right...and yet fail to see who is limiting who....
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Because true and false are not absolutes.
LOL! NO?! you're world must be sad... because true and false are absolutes in and of themselves, it is the problem of people when they have a complex statement with elemets that are true and false and they can't realize which is true or false, then do they only say crap like, 'there is no absolute true or false'
Give me a break!
Quote:
There is an unreachable truth, let's call it one, and a nexus of anti-truth, call it zero. If you happen to hold a position at .50, then you are half right/half wrong.
No, my friend, it is not on a scale...it is either truth or not truth... 99% true and 1% false is not truth....to believe so is folly...but this does not apply to statements it applies to individual and basic facts; they must be 100% true, if not they are false...
Finding out the earth is a trillion years old then saying that that knowledge supercedes believing in God is not only idiotic it is illogical and comes from someone who would rather not believe in God or has been lied to/ lacks understanding/ deisre to know about the nature of what it is to believe in God or what God is....
unfortunately some are more right then others...
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and my ego is standing up for team me,
and that is as I have said the ultimate downfall to any intellectual pursuit, PRIDE.
You see, I had someone ask me how I can reconcile being Catholic, a Philosopher, and a believer in science all in one?
I now see where he is coming from when people are unable to see that they are all part of the same machine...you can't have it running properly if you only believe in one part of the whole...You think pursuing one to it's fullest extent will get you anywhere? THere are ethics in this world that must be followed or the world (what's left of it) will become a bitterly bleak place (hence Religion is needed to keep boundaries intact) and with out philosophy people will be stuck with out the necessary glue to hold their life together and apply both scientific knowledge and religious knowledge as one cohesive unit...
*sigh*
you must know that nothing I say takes anything away from YOU. You must also know that knowing something else does not cancel out what you already know...
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006 7:07 PM
Quote:
Why would scientists falsely claim that the earth is 4.6 Gyr old, if scientific evidence asserts a 3.3 Gyr age, simply because they want to dispute the Creation argument which claims that the earth is ~10,000 years old?
No. Because scientists are human beings, and make errors of their own. The thing is, most of this stuff is written by academics, and once something becomes doctine, it tends to stay, whether the evidence supports it or not, until such a time as it is proven undeniably false.
The origin of the assertion was actually not based on any scientific evidence at all. The universe was suspected to be around 5 billion years old, and moon rocks were found to date from 4.6 billion years old, and so a theory was constructed. The speculation of the Earth's age was originally generated from that model.
But that makes it by no means a sacred number. The model could be flawed. It's quite possible that the cooling of planets is in fact much slower than the model would indicate, and there is plenty of evidence in the solar system that that may be the case.
Quote:
Is there something about 3.3 billion years that doesn’t say “old” compared to 10,000, like 4.6 Gyr?
You're really missing the point. First off, I don't give a rat's ass about any opinion which starts with the idea that the Earth is 10,000 years old. That's not even in the same building as the scientific evidency, or any viable theories.
The point is, the truth is an elusive entity which is found only through due dilligence and painstaking search. It's not found by flipping to channel five and waiting for someone to spit it out. My own number 3.3 Billion may very well be wrong, but it is based on three key pieces of information which lead me to the conclusion:
1. I am fairly certain the Earth is not the original 3rd planet from the sun. It is originally the fifth planet from the sun. There's really an abundance of evidence to support that conclusion, not the least of which is that the Earth's current #3 spot places it inside the hyrdogen sphere from which the sun was formed. Since the planets were formed after the sun, it would stand to reason that nothing inside the hydrogen sphere would possess much in the way of hydrogen. 2 objects inside the sphere possess hyrogen, Mercury and the Earth, everything else does not. Both the chemical composition of the Earth and its mass would clearly position it as fifth without a serious problem, and explain the missing 5th planet.
2. The moon appears to have gone through a major trauma around 3.3 billion years ago, the age of 1/2 of its surface. This event could have been the arrival of the Earth. Picture an Earth originally on a highly eliptical orbit, or perhaps sent into one by a collision, and then being snagged into the moon's gravitational pull, Earth in it's life.
3. The absense of large amount of non-meteoric rock dated any older than 3.3 Billion years, or any at all. The moon has an abundance of older rock, in spite of constant bombardment.
4. The absense of any simple life forms prior to this date.
Now picture a seen of a newly formed planet, slowly cooling in deep space, struck by a large comet. It would be like a bullet hitting a water balloon in zero gravity. The spilled material would instant freeze, and the rest would coalesce into a new planet, probably losing it's entire original surface, should it have had any. The impact would then change the new planet's trajectory, while leaving behind in the old orbit small bits of frozen lava.
The mass of the asteroid belt is way to small to be the planet calculated by the band which would have formed it. Following Bode's law, and calculating the density of the solar disk, composition and size, you can predict that planet #5 would be about 10,000 miles in diameter. After our little accident, this planet may have become the Earth, which later joined the moon, in what is its own natural orbit, or close enough, about 3.3 billion years ago.
But accepted science is largely not scientific, and often very out of date.
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Tuesday, March 14, 2006 7:35 PM
Quote:
I thought you said that it was a fact that the earth was 3.3 billion years old?
As I understand it. Earth as a molten blob for a billion years is neither proveable nor important to the age of the Earth as far as life is concerned.
Quote:
One of the rocks that I mentioned was not from meteorites. According to a paper by Dr. Simon A. Wilde et al in Nature they have discovered evidence, not only of a solid crust on the earth 4.4 Gyr ago, but also water on that crust. It says the sample came form sedimentary rock, not meteorites. And this isn’t the only evidence of rocks on the earth older then 3.3 Gyr.
Yeah, possibly. I read the article before and the sediment was meteor derived, but I could be wrong. I'll check it out.
Quote:
Now many meteorites found on Earth do date to ~4.6 Gyr, which gives us an upper bound for the age of the Earth.
Nah, it tells us nothing at all. Those rocks could be very old, floating through space, and have hit the earth yesterday. They were probably created by a collision on a the surface of a plant or moon at that time, 4.6 b years ago.
This is a problem with science, often it draws illogical conclusions from conclusive evidence.
Take the OJ's blood in the truck. It said "oj's blood is in the truck" but doesn't tell you how it got there. The speculation was then constructed on faulty logic. I suspect Gates and Co might have put it there after stealing it from the lab.
I also firmly believe that OJ killed his wife, but that's based on other evidence. The blood on the scene, and in the truck, possibly planted, and verifying that it was OJ's by detailed genetic analysis created the illusion of proof, when actually the connection was entirely flawed.
Quote:
That is where the 4.6 number comes from, not some theory concerning the moon.
I am quite certain that this is not the case. Even if as you say newer evidence proves the case, that evidence was not available when I studied the subject, and yet the moon based theory was already in existance, so historically, I feel confident about that series of events.
Quote:
So we can safely conclude that the earth is probably not any older then 4.6 Gyr and that it is likely that a solid crust and water began to form on the surface 200 million years later.
I don't think we know anywhere near this much. I'll take a look at the links.
But here's my point:
Just because person A is told that the Earth is 10,000 years old and person B is told that the Earth is 4.6 billion years old, and then they both regurjitate it back, doesn't make Person B any smarter than Person A.
I think the fact that we analyze it as Person B being smarter is a serious problem with our society. I got to the position "Everything George W. Bush says is a lie" through paying attention, due dilligence, and researching, fact checking what he says. This also led me to the ideas that Bush was Clinton, and that neocons were former socialists. If I had just parroted one side or the other, I'd either still be supporting Bush or I'd be now supporting Hillary Clinton.
This message of "It's officially this way" becomes one of "Trust what you're told, don't try to think for yourself."
I'm by no means hinging this on my 3.3B year Earth age estimate, but the grains of the mineral could be an eroded metorite. The fact is we don't know. "Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents." would indicate I am wrong, but not support that the accepted figure is correct. Provided, of course, that the dating is accurate. But assume so, this is still much closer to what I would have thought. But the meteor data tells us nothing other than the origin of a massive number of meteorites, via major collision or some other event. Earth or the solar system could be 5 billion.
I know objectively this might seem like nitpicking the issue, but my point is: Challenge everything. If you accept the accepted word, you'll be buying the official story, and you'll end up living in the wor
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 1:31 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by cartoon:Quote:
Originally posted by SevenPercent:
You can't change facts. Facts are what they are. To be sure, they can be interpreted different ways, or be omitted, but the only people trying to 'change' facts are religious zealots.
All three of the quotes given below are given by admitted atheistic, evolutionary-supporting scientists...
...and none of those quotes had anything even remotely to do with the brunt of my statement. Actually, stop the thread, I've discovered the root of the problem; it's a lack of reading comprehension skills.
Adn then you went and did something even more blitheringly stupid, which is didn't check those quotes before you posted them. I, on the other hand, did check them.
Quote:
biologist Prof. D.M.S. Watson: "Evolution (is) a theory universally accepted not because it can be proven by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible. " [D.M.S. Watson, "Adaptation", Nature, 123:233]
Nice one - too bad it's over 70 years old and taken out of context. Here's the link,
http://members.cox.net/ardipithecus/evol/lies/lie031.html
wherein it says, and I quote, But even if the Watson quote was not hopelessly out-of-date and even if Watson was an influential figure in evolutionary biology the quote would still be invalid because it is out-of-context.
Check the link for the entire quote, because for being 70 years out of date, he's still a nice read.
Then, you proceeded to drop this fraudulent little bomb.
Quote:
geneticist Prof. Richard Lewontin (note that the italics are in the original, and not added by myself): ...yadda, yadda, yadda, edit by 7%"... [Richard Lewontin, "Billions and Billions of Demons", The New York Review, Jan. 9, 1997, p. 31]
But, that again, is a lie- The article you cite was an attack on another author, Carl Sagan, and again the quotes are taken out of context. Not to mention the fact that Lewontin has not been considered a leader in the field for more years than both of us together have probably been alive.
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/System/8870/books/LS.html
Lewontin is often taken out of context, because he is easy to borrow from since he is highly critical of other scientists work. Another link:
http://www.don-lindsay-archive.org/creation/quote_lewontin.html
Wherein it says, and I quote again, In short, Dr. Lewontin was clearly referring to the opinions of people long dead. He stated those opinions as part of explaining why he thinks those opinions are wrong. The quotes, as given, are a fraud.
And I'm not going to even get into the third one. Again, look all upon this thread and see what has happened. A creationist has popped in with out-of-context quotes and misinformation in order to rebut a point that wasn't even being made. Good work.
Is this the part now where someone comes in to tell you that you just got owned, or does everyone pretty much just know it?
------------------------------------------
He looked bigger when I couldn't see him.
Anyone wanting to continue a discussion off board is welcome to email me - check bio for details.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 2:07 AM
I footnoted the quotes. The quotes appear exactly as quoted in the source material I used in the footnotes. You have apparently found "another" source which contradicts my footnoted sources -- yet my footnoted sources are accurate.
I personally have more faith in my footnoted sources than those you've presented (which are obviously, anti-creation biased -- my sources were not anti-evolution biased). (BTW, those user-created websites were very impressive. Shows that anyone could be an expert on just about anything these days.)
I'm also left wondering what difference does it make that first quote was from 1929? Whether it was said in 1929 or 1979, it reflects the way that particular (very respected) pro-evolutionist scientist viewed the process of scientific method for "proving" evolution.
And yes, by all means, I agree with your decision to avoid the third quote, as that's the more recent and most damning to the theory of evolution, and made by one of it's staunchest advocates... Sir Fred Hoyle.
But then, nothing anyone says against the theory of evolution will satisfy those who staunchly support it even in the face of undeniable fallacies in even the most basic tenets of the theory. So, I have to agree with you that I am indeed the stupid one here. I am old enough to know better than to enter into a discussion with those who argue with accurate quotations from people on their own side who find problems with the theory they, themselves, endorse.
That other evolutionary proponents have decided to put those quotes (apparently out of context) into webpages which are clearly anti-creationism, doesn't surprise me in the least.
The original locations of those quotes are not biased sources. I stand by them. Yes, even in the face of a few John-Doe-user-created-webpages which refute those legitimate quotes.
You might want to write to Chuck Colson, too, and tell him he's an idiot for his views on why atheists are afraid of evolution being proved false. But then, I suppose that you'd probably want to tell him that he was never an atheist, and doesn't know what he's talking about.
You are absolutely correct. Never should've stepped into this one. I know when I'm outmatched. 
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 2:35 AM
You don't see scientists fighting churches for the right to teach particle physics in Sunday School, do you?
Brilliant !
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 3:09 AM
cartoon,
You inadvertantly left things out.
From the first one you left out the date:
Watson, DMS (1929), Adaptation, Nature, August 10, 123:233 The quote is obviously not about extant science.
Here is a link to other quotes from Lewontin, including this one: "Creationists have capitalized on scientific disputes among biologists on the details of the evolutionary process by pretending that serious students of the subject are themselves in doubt about evolution. Evolutionary study is a living science; as such it is rich with controversy about particular issues off detail and mechanism." http://bevets.com/equotesl3.htm
Finally, I'm not sure why you think Hoyle (an astrophysicist) has any claim to knowledge of evolution.
Nearly everything I know I learned by the grace of others.
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Wednesday, March 15, 2006 3:24 AM
Quote:
Originally posted by cartoon:
yet my footnoted sources are accurate.
Your footnotes may be accurate, your quotes/facts are not - big difference.
Quote:
I personally have more faith in my footnoted sources than those you've presented (which are obviously, anti-creation biased -- my sources were not anti-evolution biased).
Of course you didn't take your quotes from a source with anti-evolutionary bias. Sure. What you did was probably lift the quotes as they were footnoted from a creationist website that did all the hard work of taking them out of context for you. And sorry the webpage didn't meet the Cartoon gold html standard, but it did do one thing you didn't - get its facts right.
Quote:
I'm also left wondering what difference does it make that first quote was from 1929?
Are you high?
I'm sorry, that was a poor way to phrase, "do you know how many discoveries, changes, advances, etc. have been made in the field since 1929? Do you really think that evolutionary biology in 1929 was in any way even close to what is is today?"
Quote:
But then, nothing anyone says against the theory of evolution will satisfy those who staunchly support it even in the face of undeniable fallacies
Oh? Why don't you list a few of those fallacies for us then. When you do, try to make the arguments your own, and try to keep them in context.
Quote:
So, I have to agree with you that I am indeed the stupid one here...I know when I'm outmatched.
Well, at least you're rational.
Quote:
You might want to write to Chuck Colson, too,
My mistake, you aren't. Would this be the same Chuck Colson that went to prison over the Nixon scandals; the same Chuck Colson that- let me see if I get this right - believes Enron's corrupt business practices were caused by not enough people believing in Jesus? The same anti-gay, ID supporting Chuck Colson that has called for a boycott on scientific research?
I'll send out my letter first thing tomorrow.
"Dear Chuck,
You're a nutbag.
Sincerely,
7%"
Quote:
You are absolutely correct. Never should've stepped into this one.
I think more people than just you are saying that same thing.
------------------------------------------
He looked bigger when I couldn't see him.
Anyone wanting to continue a discussion off board is welcome to email me - check bio for details.
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