Perceptions of God, Creationism and Evolution

[makedonin]

Something with what was initially started:
YouTube - ‪Noah's Flood - debunked (Part 1)‬‏

YouTube - ‪Noah's Flood debunked (Part 2)‬‏

Also interesting read here:THE QUESTION OF NOAH'S FLOOD

[George S.]

A that's one of the things that came up that it was an assumption on an assumption.Real shocking stuff as to the exact age of the earth???

[makedonin]

Age determinations by radiocarbon content: checks with samples of known age

J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby

Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

SCIENCE December 23, 1949, Vol. 110

Further tests of the radiocarbon method of age determination (1–3, 6, 8,1 0) for archaeological and geological samples have been completed. All the samples used were wood dated quite accurately by accepted methods. The measurement technique consisted in the combustion of about 1 ounce of wood, the collection of the carbon dioxide, its reduction to elementary carbon with hot magnesium metal, and the measurement of 8 grams of this carbon spread uniformly over the 400-square-centimeter surface of the sample cylinder in a screen wall counter (7, 9). The background count was reduced during the latter part of the work to 7.5 counts per minute (cpm), which is some 2 percent of the unshielded background, by the use of 4 inches of iron inside 2 inches of lead shielding, plus 11 anticoincidence counters 2 inches in diameter and 18 inches long, placed symmetrically around the working screen wall counter inside the shielding. The screen wall counter had a sensitive portion 8 inches in length, so the long anticoincidence shielding counters afforded considerable protection on the ends. No end counters were used. The data obtained are presented in Table 1 and Fig. 1.
The youngest sample used was furnished by Terah L. Smiley, of the University of Arizona Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. It was a sample of Douglas fir excavated by Morris in the Red Rock Valley in 1931, the exact location being Room 6 of the Broken Flute Cave. The inner ring date is 530 A.D. and the cutting date is 623 A.D.
The next sample was furnished by John Wilson, of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, and was a piece of wood from a mummiform coffin from Egypt, dated on stylistic grounds in the Ptolemaic period 332–30 B.C. It was measured quite early in our research, when the sensitivity of the instrument was somewhat less, and so the error is larger and only one measurement was made.
TABLE 1 Age Determinations on Samples of Known Age Sample Specific activity
(cpm/g of carbon) Age (years) Found Expected Found Expected Tree Ring 11.10 ±0.31
11.52 ±0.35
11.34 ±0.25
10.15 ±0.44
11. 08 ±0.31
Average : 10.99 ±0.15 10.65 1100 ±150 1372 ±50
(577±50 A.D.) Ptolemy 9.5 ±0.45 9.67 2300 ±450 2149 ±150
(200 ±150 B.C.) Tayinat 8.97 ±0.31
9. 03 ±0.30
9.53 ±0.32
Average: 9.18 ±0.18 9.10 2600 ±150 2624 ±50
(675 ±50 B.C.) Redwood 8.81 ±0.26
8.56 ±0.22
Average : 8. 68 ±0.17 8.78 3005 ±165 2928 ±52
(979 ±52 B.C.) Sesostris 7.73 ±0.36
8. 21 ±0.50
Average : 7.97 ±0.30 7.90 3700 ±400 3792 ±50
(1843 ±50 B.C.) Zoser : Sneferu Zoser
Sneferu
7.88 ±0.74
7.36 ±0.53
6.95 ±0.40
7.42 ±0.38
6.26 ±0.41
Average:
7.04 ±0.20
7.15 4750 ±250 4650 ±75
(2700 ±75 B.C.)
4575 ±75
(2625 ±75 B.C.)
Average:
4600 ±75
(2650 ±75 B.C.)
The next sample was furnished by Robert Braidwood, of the Oriental Institute, and consisted of two fragments of wood (Pinus halepensis) from the floor of a central room in a large hilani (palace) of the Syro-Hittite period in northwestern Syria. Prof. Braidwood dated the material between 725 and 625 B.C. from an imported Corinthian alabastron fragment, together with a great deal of historical evidence. This sample was measured with considerable care and with our most sensitive instrument. The agreement seems to be satisfactory.

Fig.1. Specific activities for samples of known age.

The redwood sample was furnished by Edmund Schulman, of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. It was a fragment of the inner part of a Sequoia gigantea tree felled in 1874 A.D. It is known as the Centennial Stump and has been described by A. E. Douglass (4). The sample furnished carried a sequence of rings from 1031 to 928 B.C.
The fifth sample was a piece of deck board from the funerary boat of the Egyptian Sesostris III, which is displayed in the Chicago Natural History Museum. The wood probably is cedar of Lebanon. The sample was kindly furnished to us by the museum through the good offices of C. C. Gregg and Alex Spoehr. John Wilson dated the material as 1843 ±50 B.C.
The last sample, really being two samples, was described, with measurements, in an earlier publication (10). One of the two was from the tomb of Sneferu of Meydum (furnished by Froelich Rainey, of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia), which was 4575 ±75 years old. The other was from the tomb of Zoser at Sakkara (furnished by Ambrose Lansing, of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City), which was 4650 ±75 years old. The former sample was cypress wood and the latter acacia. The dates were given by John Wilson.
The agreement between prediction and observation is seen to be satisfactory. The errors quoted for the specific activity measurements are standard deviations as computed from the Poisson statistics of counting random events. One of the six average values, and seven of the 17 individual runs, differ by more than one standard deviation unit from the predicted value. Since in a long series of measurements 32 percent may be expected to fall outside this limit, we may conclude that the statistical error is the major source of scatter. Thus the deviation in the Douglas fir tree-ring sample should not be considered significant.
The errors quoted in the column “Age (years)” of Table 1 include also the uncertainties in the (relative) value of the present-day specific activity, and in the value of the half-life of C14.
At intervals throughout the work, samples of anthracite coal were measured and no significant radioactivity was ever found. This served as a check on possible sources of contamination in the course of the measurement, such as chemicals used in processing, and the necessary exposure to air during the handling of the material.
These results indicate that the two basic assumptions of the radiocarbon age determination method — namely, the constancy of the cosmic radiation intensity and the possibility of obtaining unaltered samples — are probably justified for wood up to 4600 years. The fact that the most ancient samples agree with the predicted value shows that the cosmic ray intensity has been constant to within about 10 percent for periods up to 20,000 years ago. This refers to variations over intervals comparable with the half-life of radiocarbon, 5720 ±47 years (5); it is obvious that shorter time variations would average out and would not affect the measurements.
The Sequoia gigantea sample has an additional interest of its own in that the wood spent most of its time at the heart of a live tree, and if any chemical processes had occurred involving the inner heartwood the specific radioactivity would have been elevated above the value found. In other words, this check apparently shows that the redwood heartwood is truly dead and does not partake in any of the metabolic processes of the tree. This finding is not surprising to most botanists.
These results seem sufficiently encouraging to warrant further investigation and application of the method. We have been assisted in this work from the beginning by a committee of the American Anthropological Association and the Geological Society of America, consisting of Frederick Johnson, chairman, Donald Collier, Richard Foster Flint, and Froelich Rainey. This committee advised us what samples of known age to use for testing and greatly assisted us in procuring them. The attempt to establish the method for the great unknown periods of prehistory has involved further work with this committee and the majority of our decisions and efforts to date on unknown samples have been directly connected with their efforts. It was decided that the proof of the method in periods older than 5000 years, for which there are no generally accepted dates for testing, would have to be obtained by checks of internal consistency from a wide variety of samples and in a wide variety of problems. Eleven different major dating questions were selected for this purpose and prominent investigators in each case were invited to collaborate in the research. The problems selected were: Early Man, with Frank H. H. Roberts, Jr.; California-Oregon, with Robert Heizer; Hopewell-Adeha, with James Griffin; Mankato, with Richard Foster Flint; Mesopotamia and Western Asia, with Robert Braidwood; Peru, with Junius Bird; Scandinavia and Western Europe, with Hallam Movius; the Southeast, with William S. Webb; the Yukon, with Frederick Johnson; the Valley of Mexico and Tepexpan Man, with Helmut de Terrafand Pollen Chronology, with Edward Deevey.
It is hoped that investigators who have samples fitting into these general problems will write to the collaborators named, to the committee, or to the authors, so that the best materials available can be used for the research. The samples may consist of wood, charcoal, peat, cloth, flesh, and possibly antler, teeth, and shell. Since ten grams of carbon is needed for a single measurement and at least two independent measurements should be made on each sample, some two ounces of wood or charcoal and correspondingly larger quantities of the other materials, according to their carbon content, are needed. In important cases, where only smaller amounts can be furnished, measurements can be made at some sacrifice of accuracy.
The authors are extremely grateful to E. C. Anderson, whose contributions to the development of the technique of measurement were very great. Also, thanks are due Robert Merrill and Richard Wolfgang for assisting in the measurements. The research has been and is now supported in large part by a grant from the Viking Fund, Inc., of New York City. It is hoped that during the next year a decisive test of the method for the prehistoric periods up to 20,000 years will be obtained through the investigations described.
References

1. Anderson, E. C. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1949.
2. Anderson, E. C. et al. Science, 1947, 105, 576.
3. Anderson, E. C. et al. Phys. Rev., 1947, 72, 931.
4. Douglass, A. E. Tree Ring Bull., 1946, 13, 5.
5. Engelkemeir, A. G. et al. Phys. Rev., 1949, 75, 1825.
6. Grosse, A. V. and Libby, W. F. Science, 1947, 106, 88.
7. Libby, W. P. Phys. Rev., 1934, 46, 106.
8. Ibid., 1946, 69, 671.
9. Libby, W. F. and Lee, D. D. Phys. Rev., 1939, 55, 245. 10. Libby, W. F., Anderson, E. C., and Arnold, J. K. Science, 1940, 109, 227.

(source)

(original full pdf can be found here)

[Vangelovski]

Those youtube clips on the fossil record and sedimentary layers just killed a few straw men!

[makedonin]

Those youtube clips on the fossil record and sedimentary layers just killed a few straw men!

You have got them all already. None left for the others.

[Vangelovski]

Age determinations by radiocarbon content: checks with samples of known age

J. R. Arnold and W. F. Libby

Institute for Nuclear Studies, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

SCIENCE December 23, 1949, Vol. 110

You're so missing the point...its as if you havn't read anything I've posted and you're making irrelevant posts...

Btw, there's been further research on the matter since 1949.

[Vangelovski]

Just a small snippet:

Dr Colin Patterson, Senior Palaeontologist at the British Museum (Natural History) in London, in 1978 published a book on evolution.1 Designed to be a popular book on the subject, it is still being sold in museums, even here in Australia. So it is still regarded as an authoritative presentation on evolution, including the fossil record. Yet, even though fossils are mentioned in a number of places in the book, nowhere does Patterson illustrate any ‘missing links’ between major types of organisms, such as between fish and amphibians.

In 1979 American Luther Sunderland read Patterson’s book and noticed this rather obvious lack of even a single photograph or drawing of a transitional fossil. So he wrote to Patterson asking why this omission, and in a letter dated 10 April 1979 Patterson replied in these words:

‘… I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book. If I knew of any, fossil or living, I would certainly have included them. … Gould and the American Museum people are hard to contradict when they say there are no transitional fossils … You say that I should at least “show a photo of the fossil from which each type of organism was derived.” I will lay it on the line—there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.’2

1. Patterson, C., 1978. Evolution, British Museum (Natural History), London and University of Queensland Press, Brisbane.
2. Sunderland, L.D., 1984. Darwin’s Enigma: Fossils and Other Problems, Master Book Publishers, San Diego (California), p. 89.

[TrueMacedonian]

TM, if this is the case, why has western academia accepted this as an accurate method? In just a few points, can you summarise the arguments which support their POV? Is it sufficent to eliminate enough necessary doubt?

Vangelovski - Did all of the different types of humanoids who were once living among each other die out as a result of the prevalence of modern human types? If so, when would this have all taken place, or better yet, when would have the last of them died out? You may not have specific answers to the above, even if it is a general opinion, that's fine.

SoM there are several methods of dating how old the Earth is. So far as I have looked into it scientist, and when I say scientists I mean those in the majority around the world, agree that the Earth is well over a billion years old. This site here provides a basic breakdown on the methods used and how they came to their conclusions:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nuclear/clkroc.html

Ages determined by radioactive decay are always subject to assumptions about original concentrations of the isotopes. The natural radioactive series which involve lead as a daughter element do offer a mechanism to test the assumptions. Common lead contains a mixture of four isotopes. Lead 204, which is not produced by radioactive decay provides a measure of what was "original" lead. It is observed that for most minerals, the proportions of the lead isotopes is very nearly constant, so the lead-204 can be used to project the original quantities of lead-206 and lead-207. (Lead-208 is the final stable product of the Thorium series, so is not used in uranium-lead dating.) The two uranium-lead dates obtained from U-235 and U-238 have different half-lives, so if the date obtained from the two decays are in agreement, this adds confidence to the date. They are not always the same, so some uncertainties arise in these processes.

There are powerful rationales for using lead isotopes as indicative of concentrations at the point when the lead-containing mineral was in the molten state. Since the isotopes of lead are chemically identical, any processes that brought lead into the mineral would be completely indiscriminate about which isotope was brought in. The forming mineral will incorporate lead-204, lead-206 and lead-207 at the ratio at which they are found at that location at the time of formation. Any departure from the original relative concentrations of lead-206 and lead-207 relative to lead-204 could then be attributed to radioactive decay.

Making use of the decay constants of both 238U and 235U, plus the fact that the consistent isotopic ratio of 238U/235U = 137.88 is found, Holmes and Houtermans developed a system to use the ratios of the lead isotopes to produce Pb-Pb isochrons for dating minerals. This approach is generally considered to be the most precise for determining the age of the Earth.

Now if we go by Genesis and people who actually believe that it started as the bible says it did we fall into a problem almost immediately.

http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html

What came first man or animal????

[makedonin]

You're so missing the point...its as if you havn't read anything I've posted and you're making irrelevant posts...

The point being that Radiocarbon is inaccurate to tell us what date the earth and everything else is, thus you can smuggle your "young creation" stuff?

By far, the discrepancy of that dating is well known and always in-calculated, and you don't come not nearly to your desired date, that being somewhere around 6000 years.

Congrats, you have successfully struggled the cat.

Btw, there's been further research on the matter since 1949.

Of course it was done, here you can go on and work through that first before anyone can take you seriously.

http://www.sciencemag.org/search?site_area=sci&y=6&fulltext=Radiocarbon%20Dating&x=42&submit=yes

[TrueMacedonian]

I think we should examine everything in the bible and how it came to be before we bother continuing on with a debate of how old the Earth is.





Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman

[makedonin]

I think we should examine everything in the bible and how it came to be before we bother continuing on with a debate of how old the Earth is.

And should keep in mind the reason for creationists involving into science, as summed by Ernan McMullin

Ernan McMullin has pointed out, Christian doctrines are more than metaphysics and codes for moral conduct; they are also cosmic claims that say something about the universe and what it contains of things. For this reason theologians need to pay attention to cosmology in particular and to science in general.

[TrueMacedonian]

The point being that Radiocarbon is inaccurate to tell us what date the earth and everything else is, thus you can smuggle your "young creation" stuff?

By far, the discrepancy of that dating is well known and always in-calculated, and you don't come not nearly to your desired date, that being somewhere around 6000 years.
Congrats, you have successfully struggled the cat.

Of course it was done, here you can go on and work through that first before anyone can take you seriously.

http://www.sciencemag.org/search?sit...=42&submit=yes

Makedonin is right. As much as creationists like to dig for articles on creationist websites like Tom has done on page 11 -

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-radioactive.html

we need to take into account that they're using a book that was written with the utmost simplicity for a largely simple people of its time. The bible has many incredible stories in it. However it is not the literal word of god as some would like to believe. Religion is based on faith. Faith in words written by men and sermons delivered by men.

[George S.]

TM religion some of it is man made or should i say most of it.If the bible is not true or if god doesn't exist.We haven't got a hope in hell if there is a next life.That means if god is not there to design his universe & build it how can life evolve from nothing.Surely god is the life giver,knowledge giver,understanding giver.In all of our arguments i see that god is left out of the equation.We forget that god can make the earth appear 100 million,100 billion years old.He has done it to test us.Not for us to test him.We do understimate god & his power.There are some things that god wants at this time unrevealled that we have to accept it with faith.

[Vangelovski]

By far, the discrepancy of that dating is well known and always in-calculated, and you don't come not nearly to your desired date, that being somewhere around 6000 years.

What is "in-calculated"?

[Vangelovski]

TM,

I've already dealth with the man v animals nonsense in one of the other threads, but seeing as you brought it up with Bart, I'll do it again in my response that I'm preparing for his other stuff. Its amazing you take Barts word so uncritically...hmmm...sounds like a lot of faith to me...too bad its in the wrong person! But, this is just another example in what is becoming a long line of uncritical thinking and superficial research.