Creation vs. Evolution

[Kdall]

Dear Kdall,

Nice of you to post. I agree with your first paragraph. Now 65,000,000 is a lot of years and I don't believe that. Just because science says it's been that long doesn't mean that they are right. They've been wrong too many times before.

Michael

Like when? When in the last 100 years (modern scientific era) have 99.7% of all scientists been wrong?

 

[noguru]

Dear Kdall,

Nice of you to post. I agree with your first paragraph. Now 65,000,000 is a lot of years and I don't believe that. Just because science says it's been that long doesn't mean that they are right. They've been wrong too many times before.

Michael

Science progresses, and yes that means correction. Yes we do get more accurate as we compile more evidence in regard to the veracity of a theoretical model. The YEC model has been in the trash heap for over 150 years, precisely because science has gotten more accurate over the years. Do you dispute that science in general is progressive and leads to increased accuracy in our understanding of our surroundings?

 

[Kdall]

Dear Kdall,

I don't know what you are referring to here, but you could clarify it for me/us. Thanks dude!!

Michael

6days likes to say that. Along with "evolutionists" and "strawman"

 

[MichaelCadry]

This is one of those classically silly knee-jerk type responses that creationists sometimes employ. Aside from the fact that Noah and the Ark is a fable, elementary students in schools today know more real science than anyone did a couple thousand years BC. Science wasn’t even recognized as a formal discipline until about the early 1800s. Yup, hundreds of thousands of PhD scientists in Noah’s day. I love it.

Dear BJDavis,

I see you are an atheist, so I do understand your mindset is different. That's fine. But Noah and his Ark is NOT a fable. Did you not read about ten to fifteen posts back that scientists said there was a worldwide flood?? It's in the post about C-14 dating. Thanks BJDavis!!

Michael

 

[Kdall]

Dear BJDavis,

I see you are an atheist, so I do understand your mindset is different. That's fine. But Noah and his Ark is NOT a fable. Did you not read about ten to fifteen posts back that scientists said there was a worldwide flood?? It's in the post about C-14 dating. Thanks BJDavis!!

Michael

Is the Epic of Gilgamesh a fable? It's older than the Jewish Noah tale

 

[MichaelCadry]

This is one of those classically silly knee-jerk type responses that creationists sometimes employ. Aside from the fact that Noah and the Ark is a fable, elementary students in schools today know more real science than anyone did a couple thousand years BC. Science wasn’t even recognized as a formal discipline until about the early 1800s. Yup, hundreds of thousands of PhD scientists in Noah’s day. I love it.

Dear BJDavis,

Please see the following quote:


"Carbon dating relies on the hypothesis that the date of decay for the element carbon-14 is constant and has remained throughout time. However, this may not be the case and there is evidence to support the opposite case. Using iron-57 and isotopes of uranium-238 experiments have demonstrated that rates of decay not only can vary, they do. Even changing environmental conditions can alter rates of decay.

Carbon dating relies on the assumption that carbon-14 formation remained constant over the years. However, we know that carbon-12 formation was changed by human intervention. The industrial revolution increased carbon-12 concentrations. There is reason to believe that atomic bomb testing carried out in the 1950s may not only have increased neutrons in the surrounding area, but worldwide, causing a change in carbon-14 concentrations. Some scientists now believe that a worldwide flood did occur (similar to the one mentioned in countless religious texts). This would have impacted vegetation and impacted at least carbon-12 and perhaps carbon-14."

www.scienceforums.net › Sciences › Physics

Michael

 

[MichaelCadry]

God'sWord tells us you are wrong.

Science should tell you are wrong.*

Logic should tell you that your circular reasoning is only convincing to some evolutionists. Eg.
'C-14 dating is accurate except when it produces results that that contradict evolutionism'.

Dear 6days,

Thanks for having my back. I need you here. I cannot answer all of these posts. I will just have to stop and answer more later.

May God Always Nurture The Truth In You!!

Michael

You're :first:

 

[noguru]

Dear 6days,

Thanks for having my back. I need you here. I cannot answer all of these posts. I will just have to stop and answer more later.

May God Always Nurture The Truth In You!!

Michael

You're :first:

Nah, he is more like number 2. Judging from his posts on this site.

 

[DavisBJ]

Dear BJDavis,

I see you are an atheist, so I do understand your mindset is different. That's fine. But Noah and his Ark is NOT a fable. Did you not read about ten to fifteen posts back that scientists said there was a worldwide flood?? It's in the post about C-14 dating. Thanks BJDavis!!

Michael

There’s quite a number of credible Phd scientists who believe that. Many of the more prolific authors of Creationist literature are PhDs. A few years ago I kept an informal list of how many scientists with academic credentials were in the fundamentalist camp. As I recall, it was several hundred.

But the thing that I have issue with is that almost every scientist I know of that supports most of the Creation accounts do so specifically because they want to validate their theological leanings. How many scientists, with no prior incentive to one camp or the other, conclude, based on the science alone, that the Bible is credible?

If fundamentalist Christianity is true, I would expect science to be getting closer and closer to the Biblical account. If anything, I see the gap between science and most religions widening. The more perverted I see fundamentalists twisting science, the less respect I have for either them or their vaunted morals.

 

[MichaelCadry]

God's Word doesn't.

Science overwhelmingly doesn't

You literally cannot comprehend radiometric dating. It's getting depressing

Dear Kdall,

Yes, I comprehend radiometric dating. I believe 6days does too. We are just concerned about variables that would show the methods to be unreliable scientifically.

Michael

 

[MichaelCadry]

I am amazed that this person even knows how to breathe.

Dear noguru,

You only WISH you were as WISE as 6days. Face it, you are a "Christian" who doesn't believe in the "Creation" story written in the Holy Bible. It's that simple. Your are found lacking on the Christian side.

Michael

 

[MichaelCadry]

That's what makes this whole thing so entertaining. "What are those crazy young earth creationists going to say next?"

Dear Jose Fly,

I don't find this entertaining. God said, "and the evening and the morning were the 6th day." And He rested on the seventh DAY. 7 DAYS total. Not EONS, Not DECADES OR A THOUSAND YEARS. You all have to get on track. Why in the world would you call yourself a fly. I can just see you rubbing your putrid front legs together. You should just find another monicker. But that's up to you. How about Jose Cicada. Something spectacular and rare.

Michael

:deadhorse:

 

[MichaelCadry]

And then they wonder why no one takes them seriously.

Dear noguru,

I take them seriously. Believers in God and Christ would say that Adam was created along with the Universe and Earth in the space of a few days. God is quite capable of making an aged Universe and Earth, just like He made an aged man {Adam}.

Michael

 

[DavisBJ]

Dear Kdall,

Yes, I comprehend radiometric dating. I believe 6days does too. We are just concerned about variables that would show the methods to be unreliable scientifically.

Michael

You might “comprehend” radiometric dating (whatever “comprehend” is supposed to mean), but you have clearly shown you DO NOT have a very robust understanding of it. As I have already discussed, until your variables are so powerful as to alter the weak nuclear force, then you are just blowing smoke.

 

[MichaelCadry]

Michael – just to recap:

Earlier, when expressing your doubts about the reliability of dating things using radioactive decay, you said:

In response to your implying that we must live long enough to see half of the sample decay before we can test the half-life method, I explained that it is not at all necessary to wait for half of the sample to decay in order to determine the half-life.

In response, rather than directly admitting your understanding of how half-life is determined was incorrect, you opted to basically ignore that and try and toss some other issues into the fray:

This type of response is one reason why it is a tad embarrassing even trying to have an intelligent conversation with you. If you were some kid approaching your teen-age years, it would be far more understandable. But for someone who repeatedly claims an understanding of science <half-lives obviously an exception>, you even assert:

I had never realized that the archangel Michael was a high-school dropout. Is your sharing the same name as the archangel a subtle hint that you are actually one and the same?

Anyway, let me take a few minutes and share some info on radioactive decay. (Feel free to share this with your angel buddy namesake.)

Semtex is a plastic explosive widely used in both industry and by the military. You definitely don’t want to be close to it when it is detonated. It is primarily composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. Now – a thought experiment. Imagine we attach a little teeny label on every single atom in a block of semtex. Each label has a unique number, along with the symbol for the name of the atom it is attached to (C or O or N or H). Our objective will be to see what happens to the atoms as a result of the detonation.

Now we put in a detonator, get a long ways away, and set it off. A big flash of light, junk flying everywhere, massive destruction, a deafening boom. Now we send some lackeys (grad students) out to document what happened to every one of those labelled semtex atoms. Years later, when the last grad student has successfully reported back, we compile our data, and viola, big surprise (surprise only to a creationist), every single atom of carbon is still just an atom of carbon, every oxygen atom is still around, and nitrogen, and hydrogen. In spite of all of these atoms being part of a horrific explosion, not a one of them was fundamentally changed. They are no longer in the semtex. Some of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms have now gone on to form water molecules, and some of the carbon atoms were taken up by nearby foliage, and nitrogen just joined the nitrogen already in the atmosphere.

Ionic bonding, and covalent bonding (remember those terms from your chem classes?) Ionic and covalent bonding describe the ways the electrons in the atoms attach to other atoms. For reasons I haven’t got time to go into here, suffice it to say that in some chemical compounds the electrons are pretty firmly attached where they are, yet there are changes (rearrangements of the atoms and bonding) that could be made resulting in a much tighter attachment of the electrons to the atoms they are with. That’s what happens when semtex explodes – it is safe to handle because the electrons are firmly attached where they are, yet if given a strong boost, the electrons and atoms can start rearranging into a much lower-energy configuration, releasing a whole lot of the excess energy in the process. The detonator provides the initial boost to start that rearrangement. Once it starts, the energy released by the first atoms and electrons provides plenty of energy for the next layer of atoms and electrons to rearrange, and a split second later, they are all done, with lots of the former H and O atoms now in lower energy H2O molecules, and N atoms in N2 molecules, etc, with the whole hot mass expanding out in the form of an explosion.

Where am I going with this? You mention gases mixing in with the radioactive sample altering the radioactive decay. Just as the impressive energy in plastic explosives comes from nothing more than changing the way the orbital electron energies are distributed, so also any introduction of gases, water, contaminants, etc, will do no more than allow the atoms to perhaps join into new and different molecules. (In fact this was one of the techniques proposed to separate radioactive uranium atoms from stable uranium atoms for the first atomic bomb. The two types of uranium atoms have slightly different atomic weights, so when combined with oxygen they form gas molecules that are of two slightly different weights. Fill a long tube with cotton, then put the gas mixture in one end. The lighter molecules will be bouncing around very slightly faster than their beefier brothers, and will find their way through the maze of cotton fibers more quickly. The first gas atoms to come out the other end of the tube will be more enriched in one of the types of uranium than the other. Finally, chemically strip off the oxygen atoms to recover the enriched radioactive uranium metal.)

I know this is a lot of stuff, but there is one more crucial thing to understand, and everything I have described above is just a prelude. Radioactive decay is a nuclear process. It is not involved with the electrons orbiting the atoms – the ionic or the covalent bonding. It involves forces unique to the nucleus, forces which are vastly more powerful than those seen in the semtex explosion. Screwing around with the electrons in orbit around the atoms has almost no effect on what is happening in the nucleus. That is why you use semtext (or something equivalent) to blow up an enemy building (using changes in ionic and covalent boding energies), but when you release a small fraction of the energy in the nucleus in a weapon, you assure that tears will flow for many decades at the memorial in Peace Park in Hiroshima. (I have been there a number of times. And cried.)

Summary – if you are not materially altering the nuclear energies, and you are speaking of reactions involving only orbital electrons, then you are not going to have much effect on decay rates.

Dear DavisBJ,

I understand here most all, if not all, of what you are saying. To begin with, I meant earlier that none of us would be around after the 'half-life' to see the pending results of the end of decaying. Now, I am concerned about some other element(s) having an effect on the decaying process. Can we be sure that they are not altered by, let's say, Helium, and cause a different result. Not just Helium, but any element.

Thank you so very much for your hard work and perfect post (except you used the word bode instead of bond). Otherwise it was excellent, which is not easy to do. Congratulations. But, about hydrogen decaying, who is to say that some other atoms or elements could cause a significant change in the results of the time span of the decaying process. Do you understand at all what I'm saying here? I'm sure you do. You seem proficient enough. I am just not convinced that I can count on uranium or hydrogen being contaminated and giving a different result. I know you take a small portion of the element, say uranium or hydrogen, and see how long it decays percentage-wise. There are too many factors possible to have me agreeing with the results of any aging elements. OK, will get going.

Thanks Again, BJ,

Michael

P.S. No, I do not think I am the archangel Michael. I do think he guides me though.

 

[MichaelCadry]

Science progresses, and yes that means correction. Yes we do get more accurate as we compile more evidence in regard to the veracity of a theoretical model. The YEC model has been in the trash heap for over 150 years, precisely because science has gotten more accurate over the years. Do you dispute that science in general is progressive and leads to increased accuracy in our understanding of our surroundings?

Dear noguru,

Yes, I dispute science in general regarding their methods of dating and the accuracy of them. We have found discrepancies with Carbon, so we could find the same thing about uranium or hydrogen later on down the line. There are no guarantees with science. Is our Sun made of hydrogen, sulfur and helium? Or just hydrogen and sulfur? How do we take a sample to check it out? Some things just don't add up. I believe in science, of course, but not every exact thing they say. But I believe in much of science. Do you know that I understood every bit of BJ's post?? I've had science classes too. So I'm not illiterate there. I cannot help that I feel that contamination or discrepancies later on down the line are possible. Thanks for your input.

Michael

arty:

 

[MichaelCadry]

Like when? When in the last 100 years (modern scientific era) have 99.7% of all scientists been wrong?

Dear Kdall,

For one thing, the accuracy of Carbon dating methods. For another, the worldwide flood. There is no telling what else.

Michael

 

[MichaelCadry]

Is the Epic of Gilgamesh a fable? It's older than the Jewish Noah tale

Dear Kdall,

I don't think that the Epic of Gilgamesh is a fable. Scientists think that there was a worldwide flood. See below:

Here is a copy of my post to 6days regarding dating methods of carbon, iron, and uranium. Please see the following quote:


"Carbon dating relies on the hypothesis that the date of decay for the element carbon-14 is constant and has remained throughout time. However, this may not be the case and there is evidence to support the opposite case. Using iron-57 and isotopes of uranium-238 experiments have demonstrated that rates of decay not only can vary, they do. Even changing environmental conditions can alter rates of decay.

Carbon dating relies on the assumption that carbon-14 formation remained constant over the years. However, we know that carbon-12 formation was changed by human intervention. The industrial revolution increased carbon-12 concentrations. There is reason to believe that atomic bomb testing carried out in the 1950s may not only have increased neutrons in the surrounding area, but worldwide, causing a change in carbon-14 concentrations. Some scientists now believe that a worldwide flood did occur (similar to the one mentioned in countless religious texts). This would have impacted vegetation and impacted at least carbon-12 and perhaps carbon-14."

www.scienceforums.net › Sciences › Physics


Please tell me what you think. Do you understand this? This alludes to a worldwide flood also. How can I trust iron-57 or uranium-238 dating for sure also. Who is to say it will not be proven wrong later on down the line??

God Grant You Serenity And Much Love,

Michael

 

[MichaelCadry]

Dear BJ,

So what do you think? Some scientists believing there was a worldwide flood that could have impacted C-12 or C-14. Who knows what that could do to Hydrogen or Uranium. See Post #8536. Your feedback?

Michael

 

[The Barbarian]

Some scientists now believe that a worldwide flood did occur (similar to the one mentioned in countless religious texts). This would have impacted vegetation and impacted at least carbon-12 and perhaps carbon-14."

From time to time, we see someone try that story. But when asked for some evidence for these scientists and their beliefs, they have nothing to show.

How about you?