toldailytopic "Evolutionary theory isn't about the origin of life"
- Thread starter 7djengo7
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Arthur Brain
Well-known member
LOLOL:yoshi::bowser::luigi::mario:K:
Um, yeah, okayyyy then.
You should probably stick to playing Mario, Donkey Kong and the like really.
Right. The Theory of Evolution isn't about the problems with common descent according to its adherents. But a challenge to an idea can only be about something wherein there is disagreement. I don't disagree with evolution if it means "change". Why would I?
I don't disagree with evolution if it means "change in the allele frequency of a population over time". That happens with each birth and death in a population! Why would I challenge the idea of evolution over that?
So what is there to talk about if you aren't talking about common descent? That's what I'm challenging, not "change" or "change in allele frequency of a population over time". There is a change in allele frequency of a population at every birth or death in a population! Why would I challenge your idea on something I myself agree with?
So, go ahead and let's dispense with common descent for the moment. But if you don't get to your point within a single post, I'm going to go back to discussing common descent, which makes things clear about where the challenge to your idea is. Wouldn't you prefer a clearer discussion?
Right Divider
Body part
Then why have you NOT discussed the assumptions that are the basis of radiometric dating?
So you are STILL unaware that radiometric dating is completely based on assumptions that are ALL unverifiable?
Right Divider
Body part
Do you also not know that radiometric dating is based completely on assumptions that cannot be verified?
Are you also ignore of this fact?
Alate_One
Well-known member
Do you not know your belief in scripture is based on assumptions?
Everything is based on some basic assumptions. If your argument is we can't accept anything based on assumptions then we believe in nothing.
Either we can study and observe the natural world and draw conclusions or we can't. Do you believe in ice core layers that can be counted up to 55,000 years?
Incorrect.
It is not.
It's based on evidence.
Evidence such as:
- Our faith
- The existence of morality
- Information being non-physical (laws of physics cannot give rise to symbolic logic functions)
- The human consciousness
- Pain
- Logic (and by this I mean logic itself)
All of the above are evidence of God's existence. And since it can be shown that God exists, and the Bible claims to be written by God and describes Him, and such claim is also backed up by the above evidences, we can trust that it truly is from God.
Care to state what our assumptions are that allow us to believe scripture?
That's not the argument being made.
Had you not left out the word "unverifiable," then you would have been addressing the argument we are making.
lain:Ice cores? You mean that come from the ice age that came about as a result of the global flood around 5000 years ago?
Silent Hunter
Well-known member
Why haven't you? So far you haven't named even one "assumption" with which you disagree. All you have done is make a naked assertion.
There are assumptions made in EVERY scientific hypothesis, heck, it's an integral and ESSENTIAL part of the scientific method; perhaps you should familiarize yourself with it. For instance, one of the basic assumptions of Relativity is that c, the speed of light, is the same for all observers in all inertial refererence frames. Are we absolutely certain of this? No.
As I said in a prior reply:
1. Despite your repeated (ad nauseum) assertion, there is only one assumption in radiometric dating, any other assumption(s) are derivitatives of the initial assumption; ALL isotopes decay at a CONSTANT and KNOWN rate and are specific to the particular isotope.
2. They are called assumptions for a reason.
3. If you have evidence to show that there is reason to assume isotope decay rates (half-lives) have changed then this is YOUR burden to prove, you know, falsify the hypothesis.
4. We're still waiting on your evidence that "DESTROYS" radiometric dating.
5. If assertion is the best you have then we are justified in continuing to NOT take you seriously.
Most of the decay rates used for dating rocks are known to within two percent...an accurate determination of the half-life is easily achieved by direct counting of decays over a decade or shorter. This is because a) all decay curves have exactly the same shape, differing only in the half-life, and b) trillions of decays can be counted in one year even using only a fraction of a gram of material with a half-life of a billion years.
-- Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective
Alate_One
Well-known member
You think your evidence is better than the evidence for radiometric dating?
Not evidence. That's a belief.
Questionable at best, certainly open to interpretation and based on assumption
Why? Because you said so?
How is that evidence for your specific faith? If other animals are "conscious" what does that mean?
Pain is a physiological response based on chemistry but yet no one can measure another person's pain. So does it really exist?
How do you know that logic exists? Or you exist?
These are weak lines of "evidence".
Of all the lists of evidence for the existence of God I've seen, this has to be one of the worst. Do some more reading, especially C. S. Lewis.
You must assume that you exist and are capable of understanding scripture. You must assume that scripture is in the broadest sense what it claims to be and the books that we have today are enough to believe. It is disconcerting to remember that the books of the Bible were decided by committee. Granted they chose what the early church was using broadly but still.
You must assume that the person of Christ is who He claims to be. That should be the centerpiece of any argument you make because it has some of the best support. However it still can't be tested in the scientific sense. That doesn't make it wrong, but it's a different type of knowledge.
Radiometric dating is one of the more verifiable things we have in science. The rate of decay has been tested innumerable times.
I mean the annual layers of ice that are laid down in Antarctica. You don't fit 55,000+ layers in 5000 years.
Basically your argument boils down to this: You like your assumptions better than those in science. We can test ideas in science. We can't test any of yours. You make a very poor argument for Christianity. You might want to work on your apologetics some more.
The problem with that is that it assumes no daughter element is present when the rock was formed. If that assumption is off and there was 50% of the total daughter element present during the meausrement was there at the rock's formation then the age of the rock is only 1/2 of what the measurement reads. Or say 3/4 of the total daughter element was present at the rock's formation then the age is only 25% of the measured time. There is no way of knowing that the assumption of no daughter element present at rock formation is anywhere close to accurate. It might be that 95 or even 99% of the daughter element was present at the rock's formaton.
The dating also assumes a closed system for the entire age of the rock.
These are major assumptions that have large implications in the dating processes and no one can prove they are even close to true.
Silent Hunter
Well-known member
From the cited article:
10. To date a rock one must know the original amount of the parent element. But there is no way to measure how much parent element was originally there.
It is very easy to calculate the original parent abundance, but that information is not needed to date the rock. All of the dating schemes work from knowing the present abundances of the parent and daughter isotopes. The original abundance N0, of the parent is simply N0 = N ekt, where N is the present abundance, t is time, and k is a constant related to the half life.
11. There is little or no way to tell how much of the decay product, that is, the daughter isotope, was originally in the rock, leading to anomalously old ages.
A good part of this article is devoted to explaining how one can tell how much of a given element or isotope was originally present. Usually it involves using more than one sample from a given rock. It is done by comparing the ratios of parent and daughter isotopes relative to a stable isotope for samples with different relative amounts of the parent isotope. For example, in the rubidium-strontium method one compares rubidium-87/strontium-86 to strontium-87/strontium-86 for different minerals. From this one can determine how much of the daughter isotope would be present if there had been no parent isotope. This is the same as the initial amount (it would not change if there were no parent isotope to decay). Figures 4 and 5, and the accompanying explanation, tell how this is done most of the time. While this is not absolutely 100% foolproof, comparison of several dating methods will always show whether the given date is reliable.
From the cited article:
Some doubters have tried to dismiss geologic dating with a sleight of hand by saying that no rocks are completely closed systems (that is, that no rocks are so isolated from their surroundings that they have not lost or gained some of the isotopes used for dating). Speaking from an extreme technical viewpoint this might be true--perhaps 1 atom out of 1,000,000,000,000 of a certain isotope has leaked out of nearly all rocks, but such a change would make an immeasurably small change in the result. The real question to ask is, "is the rock sufficiently close to a closed system that the results will be same as a really closed system?" Since the early 1960s many books have been written on this subject. These books detail experiments showing, for a given dating system, which minerals work all of the time, which minerals work under some certain conditions, and which minerals are likely to lose atoms and give incorrect results. Understanding these conditions is part of the science of geology. Geologists are careful to use the most reliable methods whenever possible, and as discussed above, to test for agreement between different methods.
:yawn:
Right Divider
Body part
Firstly, not in the same sense at all.
Radiometric dating is supposed to be a way to measure age... but it is not since all of the "key elements" of the method are based on unverifiable assumptions.
Just ONE example is the idea that radioactive decay has been constant since the formation of the object being measured. Just how can we prove that true? Simple... we cannot.
:juggle:
What does that have to do with MEASURING (supposedly) the age of rocks?
Does it use radiometric dating?
Right Divider
Body part
You were NOT able to sample the rate of change for hundreds of millions of years (or billions).
You do NOT know that the rate is forever constant.
You think your evidence is better than the evidence for radiometric dating?
Again, radiation is a result of the release of energy from the Flood.
Assuming millions of years and then extrapolating half-life decay rates based on that is not evidence. It's just bad science. In fact, it's not even science.
Now faith is . . . evidence . . . - Hebrews 11:1 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hebrews11:1&version=NKJV
There is no other explanation for morality other than an objective source.
Objective morality cannot arise from a materialistic system, the same way information cannot.
No.
Information is not physical. We know this because it can be transmitted at the speed of light.
Incorrect.
Pain is not physical.
Pain is awareness, and awareness is not physical.
| Neurologists claim that we sense pain with our brain. As evidence for that, they show that nerve damage can prevent the signal from an injury from reaching the brain, and in such cases, many patients indicate that they do not feel pain from that injury. However, the brain as an organ itself is completely unable to feel pain. When a brain surgeon operates and cuts into brain matter, the patient does not feel pain from that surgery. Why not? How can the brain, possibly the only organ that does not sense pain, be the very organ by which we sense pain? The answer only appears after realizing from the nature of pain itself, that pain is not physical. * Pain is Non-Physical: Pain is awareness, which is a state of knowledge. You can program a robot to back up suddenly if it bumps into a wall, and even to yell, "Ouch." But it hasn't felt pain, because it is only made of atoms and molecules, and can have no awareness, because like many very real things, sentience is not physical. The laws of logic are not physical (no mass, polarity, etc.), and neither is reason, nor the laws of grammar. Pain is awareness that something is wrong. Therefore pain is inherently non-physical, and so pain resulting from non-physical causes is dramatically more hurtful than pain resulting from physical stimuli. A paper cut on the eyeball really hurts. A father who will not look his disowned son in the eye is far more painful. The intense pain of childbirth passes quickly. The inconsolable pain of a child dying lasts for years. Physical pain dissipates more quickly because it must be converted to the non-physical realm for it to be experienced. Emotional and spiritual pain hits the soul and spirit directly, and so it persists longer and is more effective. If someone has been abandoned by his parents, he might be able to know the pain felt by the little one who is aborted, purposefully rejected by his mother, and intentionally killed, whether by a surgical or chemical abortion as with the Morning After Abortion Pill. A mother who doesn't have the willingness to love her child hurts him far beyond the physical impact of the abortion. Giving the child anesthesia will do little to alleviate his or her pain from the abortion, and nor will it help with the mother's pain when she meets that child, on Judgment Day. |
- http://kgov.com/pain
See above.
Are you really going to argue that logic does not exist? That's a very dangerous rabbit hole to follow, and the argument is self-defeating.
I know that I exist because I can say I exist, and if I wanted to be illogical, I could deny that I exist, but it wouldn't change the fact that I exist to be able to deny that I exist. If I did not exist, I would not be able to say that I exist, and I wouldn't even be able to deny that I exist.
Because you say so?
Logic and reason are evidence that God exists because God IS reason. He is logical.
God requires two or three witnesses (evidences) to establish a matter.
I provided five. I could go on and on.
The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows His handiwork.
Because you say so?
C. S. Lewis was anti-evolution:
| Lewis wrote to leading creationist Bernard Ackworth. "I wish I were younger... think that you may be right in regarding it [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives..." |
- http://kgov.com/c-s-lewis
No, I don't have to assume I exist.
I can logically deduce that I exist, because if I did not exist, I could not say that I do or do not exist, and to say the latter is illogical, for to say that I do not exist, I must first exist to be able to say so.
Was this an attempt at an ad hominem?
Rather, one merely has to read scripture and take it to mean exactly what it says in context.
Um, no, in case you've forgotten, that's what we're trying to prove or disprove.
You seem to have forgotten:
What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision?Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God. - Romans 3:1-2 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans3:1-2&version=NKJV
And?
Except it's not. There are three unverifiable assumptions that radiometric dating make.
The rate of decay has nothing to do with the unverifiable assumptions that are made that render radioactive dating to be utterly useless for determining the age of anything.
Not to mention that radioactivity was not present on the earth until the Flood.
Assuming the truth of your position is called question begging, Alate, and is a logical fallacy.
You should stop bringing your a priori beliefs into the discussion.
The evidence is that there are many layers of snow and ice in Antarctica. Saying they represent 55,000 years of snow/ice disallows discussion of the evidence outside of your beliefs.
Sure you can.
Because you say so?
Rather, maybe your position has blinded you to the simplicity of the arguments.
What makes evidence "not scientific"?
If it's not physically testable and repeatable, it's not scientific.
And here is a nuclear scientist that rejects the accuracy of radiometric dating.
https://blog.drwile.com/scientist-realizes-important-flaw-in-radioactive-dating/