The Bible, Creationism, and Prophecy (part 1)

BrianCalgary

Wicknight wrote:

Notice the ".." at the end of the "3.14.." ... that means it is an infinate number that had digits extending on from simply 3.14 :rolleyes: )?

Thanks for that.

Wicknight wrote:

I would have "us" use the correct one, to what ever degree of accuracy you deamed necessary.

I guess God deemed a 3:1 to be a good point for accuracy. I think that only the mathematicians would get bent on this one.

Wicknight wrote:

3.14 could be considered correct for the task of building a round tank. 3 couldn't.There is no level of accuracy where "3" will give you the right result. It is simply wrong You might as well use 4 or 2.

4 and 2 would be way off. In fact one could argue that 3.14 would be inaccurate as well. As the exact measurement would be different from 3.14.

Wicknight wrote:

The other possibility is that the tank wasn't a circle. But then it is described as a circle, so that would be an example of the Bible being wrong.

Well, next time I descvribe anything of a physiacl nature I will be sure to have my geometry set handy, That way the mathematicians would be happy. Whether or not it was an exact circle or circular, the ratio was pretty close to 3:1. And I believe any one with at least a modicum of intelligence would be able to picture the object in question to a degree of accuracy, which is what the author was trying to convey. God was not providing a blueprint or exact instruction on how to build it. If He was then I would say you have a valid argument.

Wicknight wrote:

Either way you look at it the Bible has made an error in maths. Which isn't surprising, Pi was not the most widely known mathematical theory at the time (though you would assume God would be aware of it). Other, non-Biblical, writing of the time have incorrectly stated that Pi was 3. The people who wrote the Bible might not have been aware of Pi, or even decimal numbers.

The Bible is not a math textbook. It is a communication from God to us on His redemptive plan of salvation. Which includes a history of His people and an instruction of living a fulfilling life. It has to be judged as that type of a communication, on that it is inerrant.

Wicknight wrote:

It does throw open the idea that the Bible is the infalable word of God. Which, to most Christians, isn't a big deal. Most Christians I know believe the Bible was written by other Jews and Christians who were attempting, as people do now, to explain the world in a religious context. It is an important book, but it isn't mean every detail is meant to be taken literally.

never said that it was all to be taken literally. There are parts that are, the history and life instructions as two examples. There is some metaphor and symbolism which can't be taken literally. The six days of creation are I believe to be historical as Peter talks about Adam as an historical figure.

Wicknight wrote:

Sure in 500AD St. Augustine was already saying that Christians should not take the science in the Bible at totally face value. He describes non-Christians laughting at the "science" in the Bible, even back then. And if it is good enought for a Saint who are we to argue?

I would argue with Augustine on the creation for the reason cited above it was an historical event. I will take Peter's word. I don'to to the bible for my science. Never have and never will. It doesn't claim to be a science book.

Wicknight wrote:

"Pretty accurate" as in incorrect. There is no maths, engineering or science exam in the world that would accept 3 as the answer. 3.14 is pretty accurate, 3 is simply wrong.

I would beg the question what else other areas of science the Bible got pretty accurate (ie wrong)?

Just to repeat . It isn't a science document.

wolfsbane

Scofflaw said:

You assume that (a) only prescriptive morality is real morality, and that (b) religion has a monopoly on prescriptive morality.

I'm not saying all prescriptive morality is real morality. False religions make absolute moral claims. I'm saying real morality is that which the God of the Bible reveals.

I'll kindly let you away with the term, although there are people who find it deeply offensive. What proof would this be?

I used it only as a geographical term. I could be offended if someone said I live live in Ireland - but if they use it in a geographical sense rather than a political one, I understand.

The morality of the British and Irish people in these islands (;) ), has greatly declined in my lifetime. I was born in 1949 and can remember when burglarly was rare, a scandal in the community. Women could walk home in the dark without molestation. Males fighting at a dance was a matter of bruises, not being kicked to death. We left our doors unlocked when we went to the shops. Things were not perfect, but the people had respect for one another and a big part of that was because they feared God. They not only considered their neighbour worthy of kindness, they feared answering to God if they abused a fellowman.

I think most of that morality was a legacy of a former generation, for it began to disappear in my teenage years. I distinctly remember a sea-change in attitude in the new intake of pupils at secondary level. That was about 1967-8. The new lot were abusive to the weaker teachers, blatantly ignoring their instructions, talking across their lectures. Obviously that did not happen overnight, but came from the loosening morality of their parents and society around them. These kids were not on drugs; the poison that was influencing their behaviour was the Godless world-view 'liberated' society had embraced.

The only thing most people fear now is being caught, and there is increasingly less chance of that.

There's no such thing as a "practical atheist" - or at least I would recognise no such animal. There are people who don't think about religion at all, but they are not atheists - it would be difficult even to describe them as agnostics, since they are not in a state of doubt. Certainly they do not reject God, or deny his existence, which would be a bit of a minimum qualification for an atheist.

I see what you are saying, that's why I say 'practical'. If one doesn't even consider whether God exists or not, maybe we can say he is not an atheist in the formal sense. But it means he will live his life as if atheism were true - no fear of God, for he does not believe in the existence of God.

However, I do not accept that most criminals have no view on the matter. Conscience is part of us all. It requires suppression when we plan to do evil. Excuses must be made to justify ourselves to ourselves. That is where the prevalence of atheistic materialism in society gives a conscience-soother to the wicked.

You, on the other hand, are confusing coercive atheism (which is nothing more than the state as religion) with organic atheism, which is a personal rejection of God. If you want to do so, I have to insist that every Christian take all necessary responsibility for anything bad any Christian or Christian country does (Crusades, Inquisition, heresy trials, priestly child abuse, hypocrisy, witch trials, gay-bashing etc) - your opt-out of "those people are Christian only in name" applies equally to State Atheism!

The point is that atheism makes it logical to be amoral; religions make it logical to obey their precriptions. That some atheists refuse to follow the logic of their system and some religionists refuse to follow the prescriptions of theirs' is another matter.

Men may adopt morals for ulterior motives: to suceed in a society that approves of such, for example. But setting aside such inticements, people will behave according to their true beliefs. Those may not be the same as their professed ones. Some atheists will be moral because really in their deepest heart they know they are accountable to God for wicked behaviour. And many professed Christians will prove to have been real atheists on Judgement Day:
Matthew 7:
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

UU

J C wrote:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." - Albert Einstein

And both faith and science meet in perfect harmony within Creation Science!!!

Creation Science is the biggest washed-up crap that unholy fundalmentalist Christians in America attempt to disguise as a "Science" which is really an attack on Evolutionism. So it is very far from perfect harmony. Christian Science would probably be closer.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_Science

You want evidence? There is no proof for Creationism, but there is much more for Evolutionism. Let me give you some better proof:

- Evidence from Palaeonology (Fossils): Geologists have found fossils of extinct species trapped in layers of sedimentary rock. Therefore, via Carbon 14 Dating and the position of each layer, the age of a fossil can be estimated. Such as Dinosaurs (let me guess, Creationists simply believe dinosaurs never existed even though there is so much evidence in front of their noses!)

- Evidence from Biogeography: Pangea, the supercontinent, existed approx. 350 million years ago and started to split into the subcontinents of today. As a result, different variations of the same species were found in different continents separated by sea. Example, the Brown bear in Nothern Eurasia and the Black bear in North America.

- Evidence from Comparative Anatomy: Many organisms share a similiar internal skeletal structure. Such as the pentadactyl limb (five toed) of many mammals which contains the same sets of bones organised in similiar ways, despite their disimiliar functions. It is an example of a homologous structure that can be connected to a common ancestor. Examples; flippers in seals, arm + five fingered hand in humans.

- Evidence from Comparative Embryology: Ever see how similiar vertebrate embryos are in the early stages of their development? Is it just a coincidence that reptiles, birds, pigs, humans, etc. all possess tails, gill pouches and a backbone (notochord). Why do human embryos have gill slits when we don't have gills? Common Ancestor!

- Evidence from Gentics: Humans and other species still have many genes in common. For example, the last ancestor that yeast and humans shared lived many hundreds of millions of years ago. However more than 90% of their proteins and genes haven't changed. Consider cytochrome c, a protein involved in respiration, in species ranging from from bacteria to humans. In humans it consists of 104 amino acids.
> Compared to human cytochrome c:
- Chimpanzees: Their entire sequence is identical (as is their haemoglobin).
- Rhesus monkeys: Differs by 1 amino acid.
- Chickens: Differs by 18 amino acids.
- Turtles: Differs by 19 amino acids.
- Yeasts: Differs by 56 amino acids.

What more evidence do you want?

Remember: The Bible isn't a history book. It's there for its spitituality. When Creationists start bickering, where is the Bible's spiritual nature? I am a realist and I'm not very gullible. That is in my nature.

Sure if I'm to accept Genesis, I might as well believe in pixies, fairies, leprachauns, giants, pots of gold and a the magical land of Oz!

BrianCalgary

UU wrote:

[- Evidence from Palaeonology (Fossils): Geologists have found fossils of extinct species trapped in layers of sedimentary rock. Therefore, via Carbon 14 Dating and the position of each layer, the age of a fossil can be estimated. Such as Dinosaurs (let me guess, Creationists simply believe dinosaurs never existed even though there is so much evidence in front of their noses!)

Dinosaurs are mentioned in Job. So yes Christians believe that dinosaurs existed. The carbon dating gives the age of the rock so it is assumed that the dinosaur died at that time therefore the dinosaur is the same age. I would suggest that the material they were buried in by a quick compression to prevent decomposition, in order to form the fossil, happened at the time of the flood, and the material is aged that old because God needed rock that old to provide the foundation of the earth. At the wedding of Cana Jesus makes the best wine, well when making wine is is aged. Therefore Jesus made aged wine as He made aged rocks.

UU wrote:

[- Remember: The Bible isn't a history book. It's there for its spitituality. When Creationists start bickering, where is the Bible's spiritual nature? I am a realist and I'm not very gullible. That is in my nature.

Sure if I'm to accept Genesis, I might as well believe in pixies, fairies, leprachauns, giants, pots of gold and a the magical land of Oz!

The Bible is a history book that goes through God's actions in the lives of His people, as one of it's purposes. The creation account is historical. Peter talks about Adam as being a real person.

I'll defer your other points to more knowladgable people, over to you JC and wolfsbane.:D

UU

Hi Brian!

Dinosaurs mentioned in the Bible? I've never heard of that!

Well I really prefer to look at the Bible as a book of metaphors and symbology as it helps my spiritual side. I also like it for its stories which have a moral meaning to them but I don't take them all as historically accurate. As I'm not Christian, I really don't understand how you take it so literally as Unitarianism is much different in that we don't have set dogma. I don't need a book to tell me how to live my life as I'd prefer to discover it for myself. To me life is one big Bible! There is something to be gained whichever way one chooses to view it. At least you're not fundalmentalist, Brian!

Well, you're entitled to your beliefs. Do take my advice on board though that you should study Evolutionism just as I'm studying Creationism. That way, you'll have an understanding of different beliefs and even if you don't accept it at least you'll be informed and won't become intolerant of Evolutionists.

I do think it is ridiculous in many parts of the USA that Evolution isn't allowed to be taught in schools because the funamentists don't believe in it. I think Creationism should be taught in religion class and Evolutionism should be taught in Biology. Is it taught in Canada? It is over here.

Well lets agree to disagree on how the world was formed and we came into existance!

samb

wolfsbane wrote:

The point is that atheism makes it logical to be amoral; religions make it logical to obey their precriptions. That some atheists refuse to follow the logic of their system and some religionists refuse to follow the prescriptions of theirs' is another matter.
]

So if you did not believe in God you would carry out immoral acts? Why? I think you are immoral if the only reason you are 'Good' is because you are afraid of God. You have no morality, you just obey Gods.

Scofflaw

samb wrote:

So if you did not believe in God you would carry out immoral acts? Why? I think you are immoral if the only reason you are 'Good' is because you are afraid of God. You have no morality, you just obey Gods.

I am inclined to agree with samb. Someone who follows the dictates of his/her religion, however well, cannot be described as moral - they are religious. If they had, perhaps, considered deeply the morals prescribed by their religion, and held them independently of any religious sanction, or perhaps disagreed with their God about certain things, then perhaps they are moral.

I am sure you anticipate the question - if a religion dictates the killing of certain people, is that moral? I am equally certain I anticipate your reply - "Christianity does not dictate killing, although some false religions that make absolute moral claims do so".

So, do you follow Christianity because you find it moral, or follow Christian morality because you are Christian?

In addition, Christian morality seems to me to be something of an a la carte from the Old and New Testaments. There are few Christians who condone slavery (per OT), but there are plenty who condemn homosexuality (per OT). The Bible is equally clear on both (as indeed it is on wearing garments of two kinds), but it seems there's an opt-out for one, but not for the other - I'm sure you've seen this. How do you reconcile these, or otherwise explain it?

With respect to your comments on the decline of public morality, specifically in terms of criminal acts - by and large, this comes back to my question about communities: I think criminality is higher in larger, more anonymous areas, and that increasing urbanisation (or suburbanisation) generally correlates with increases in crime. In addition, I would point out that a lot more domestic crime (particularly spousal and child abuse) was hushed up, and that social rules were far harsher on criminals than they now are. As to the locking of doors - to be honest, I think this is largely about perception. I lived in Aberdeen for a couple of years, and one particular year we all came back to Ireland for Christmas, leaving the house unlocked for two weeks. In most small communities you can still happily leave the car unlocked, although I wouldn't try it on O'Connell Street. A lot of this is about selling newsapers.

As to the "evolutionary" worldview allowing criminals to kid themselves that what they're doing is OK - no, I don't agree. I think there is, or was (I'm hoping it's in decline) a soft focus on crime that encouraged the perpetrator to think of themself as a "social victim", and alongside that there is an unwillingness by the majority to get involved, which tends to correlate with increased affluence (and, I would add, television, although that's a personal hobbyhorse) - you might call it a moral laziness of the kind shown up in the story of the Good Samaritan. None of these are related to evolution in any way, and I don't think that you can deny they are strong factors in any perceived decline of public morality - as is increasing age, alas!


cordially,
Scofflaw

Assyrian

wolfsbane wrote:

It is the Christian's last enemy. In itself, it is the judgement of God on sinners. God created it for that purpose. Just like Gehenna,the lake of fire, is the last enemy for the wicked, an enemy that they will never vanquish. God created Gehenna for the wicked angels, and from the Fall, for unbelieving man also.

Unfortunately the passage is dealing with the enemies of the Son of God. 1Cor 15:24 Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. 25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death. When did death become the enemy of God?

The only answer that make sense to me is that death was part of the natural world God created and only became an enemy when man sinned and death became the final barrier between sinful man and God.

You read into it more than sense implies. The command from God established Adam's right and responsibility to rule over plant and beast. He did not have that before it was given. Now he knows he can properly direct all things according to his desire; he will not be violating their dignity as God's creatures.

He was only given the right to take dominion. It wasn't handed to him on a plate, otherwise he wouldn't have to subdue it. But if we are talking about 'reading into it more than sense implies' there is no suggestion anywhere that animal death is the result of man being given dominion over them, except in the direct 'it's wabbit season' sense. But that is what this whole passage is about, God giving mankind authority to farm and hunt.

My garden produces plenty of weeds without any extra curse, so it must be from that original one. I doubt it was County Armagh Adam was sent to.

And God planted a garden East of Leitrim...?

OK I'll give you that one, God's curse on man's labour (and woman's) was not limited to the Adam and Eve, but to all mankind. (That is what Adam means after all.)

Says nothing about, doesn't mean it's not.

True. But given that you are trying to come up with scriptural support for the doctrine of animal death and suffering being the result of the fall, the lack of any support, especially in the main account in Genesis, is a really serious problem for your argument. Meanwhile, the lack of evidence is pretty good support for my claim that it is not in the bible. You can never prove a negative, but it becomes pretty obvious after a while.

Meanwhile you are proposing things that go way beyond God's decree, and adding to the sentence loads of extra punishments that the judge never sanctioned.

The co-incidence surely is remakable. Join that to the Rom.8:20 comment on the bondage of decay. No explanation of why this bondage came about? Surely an unlikely thing in this great exposition of God's plan? But it fits perfectly with the fallen creation I have outlined.

No coincidence at all. You have a passage about the fall that does not mention animal death. You have another passage about the decay in nature but doesn't say anything about the fall, and you have group of people YECs, who fervently believe animal death if s the result of the fall. Of course they connect them.

Besides, as I have told you before, Paul explains where the bondage to decay comes from in 1Cor 15.

When do you suggest bipeds first became human? Were Adam and Eve the first? Are the genealogies of Scripture that indicate only several thousands of years of human existence literal or figurative?

I think Adam and Eve are an allegorical picture of people, the human race, though I know many TEs who take them literally. I suspect the long lifespans are not literal, or we misunderstand them, but I don't think my understanding of Genesis would change that much if archaeologists unearthed Methuselah's bus pass. Yes the bus bit would be a problem, not his age. I see no reason why there can't be gaps in genealogies too. I don't think you can simply add up the ages and get the date of the flood or creation.

I think the flood is one we know about from geology or archaeology, you don't get a serious flood like that without leaving traces. The most likely candidates are the flooding of the Mesopotamian valley, the Black Sea, or the Mediterranean Basin which was much earlier. But there is no evidence of a global flood.

Like robindch, you seem confused as to what I mean by adaption. You read it as evolution from cell to fish, bird, mammal. I mean only from one sort of fish, bird, mammal to another: one with longer body, smaller wings, bigger arms, etc. You have the fish, bird and mammal all with a common ancestor. I have the fish with a fish ancestor, bird with a bird ancestor, etc.

That's all evolutionists think happened in the last few thousand years too. Basically you believe in Darwinian natural selection, it is just Neodarwinism, and the common ancestry of all species, you have problems with. You believe the species we see today are the product of natural selection, acting much more rapidly than we see today, on the very diverse gene pool that came off the ark. Except that the Genesis account does not describe a very diverse gene pool come off the ark, but rather an extremely limited breeding stock of only a single pair of each of the unclean kinds.

You missed the point: it is not 'increase' but 'make great'.

Check the primary meaning in Genesius and Strongs....

Never doubted it. I'm made in His image. That is good. Doesn't make my sin a part of His 'very good' creation.

Now you get it. It's our sin that is the fallen bit.

So speaks a true evolutionist. Must make visiting the sick a bit hypocritical.

Of course you must think taking up our cross and following him is just ridiculous. Jesus would never ask us to do something so uncomfortable and inconvenient...

Cheers Assyrian

Assyrian

J C wrote:

You are hand waving again!!!
Yes, tissue can be ‘remarkably preserved’ over THOUSANDS of years – but NOT over MILLIONS of years.

Examples found so far of preserved tissue are 20,000 years for mummified tissue and 40,000 years for frozen mammoth tissue.

Have they identified the sort of tissue in the TRex? Have they even identified it as tissue, rather than a squidgy material that 'looks like tissue' that they only found after soaking the bone in acid. Do they know how long this material lasts mummified in the middle of a partially fossilised bone? Well, obviously they can't because they don't know what it is in the first place. Saying 'tissue' can be preserved thousands of years but not millions, sounds remarkably like hand waving to me, not science, not when you don't know the substances involved or their rates of decay.

We can test for rate of decay in proteins, the racemization of amino acids. As you know amino acids in living organisms are all the left handed form. Over time this breaks down left-handed amino acids switch to the right handed, and visa versa, heading towards a 50:50 mix. Apparently the rate of decay of the amino acids matches the radioisotope age.

So the only actually measured rate of organic material decay matches the 60 million year date, all YECs have is it untested claim 'It's tissue it couldn't possible last that long.'

Because ANY well-preserved T. Rex tissue has turned up, this rules out the ‘millions of years’ hypothesis, full stop, end of story. Indeed Creation Science is aware of NUMEROUS similar finds of Dinosaur tissue within fossils.

I can only find two in AiG, the soft tissue one and the claim to have found blood cells. What in fact was found, were round reddish stains of unknown origin, which the authors thought might be of geological origin, or the remains of bacteria or fungal colonies that concentrated the iron in the fossilised bones. Traces of haem and haemoglobing breakdown products were found. But AiG go from the identification of haem to the conclusion that hemoglobin was preserved, and from round stains to preserved blood cells.

This provides objective PROOF that T. Rex lived within the recent historical past (i.e. within the past few thousand years at most). It is published by Reuters and involves researchers from North Carolina and Montana State Universities – so it should be acceptable to Evolutionists – if they are the objective people they claim to be with NO emotional attachment to ‘millions of years’ Evolution!!!

Could I point out that Reuters is a news agency and not a scientific journal? The actual scientific data does not support your claims.

However, you are still 'hand waving' and denying the obvious – just like the rest of the Evolutionists on the rest of this thread!!!.

Speaking of hand waving, you didn't answer the questions about where all the dinosaur meat has gone. All AiG can come up with is microscope slides of tiny fragments they claim without scientific analysis is tissue. We have mummies tens of thousands of years old where their tissue wonderfully preserved. YECs will say they are only four thousand years old, but they believe the dinosaur fossils are about the same age. Where is all the mummified dinosaur meat. We shouldn't be talking about microscopic traces of highly questionable 'tissue', we should see slabs of dried dinosaur jerky in museums all around the word. People should be digging it up and feeding their dogs with it. Where's the meat?

Every species that is alive today is well adapted to it’s environment.

That is why you see more evolutionary changes when there is a change in environment.

The aquatic environment in which Coelacanths, Sharks and Crocodiles live IS very dynamic and competitive. Indeed Sharks and Crocodiles are themselves very aggressive and competitive creatures and you would expect that they would change dramatically over 300 million years – if Evolution is true and they have been around for 300 million years!!

If Evolution is positively ‘jumbling the genome’ – why are Coelacanths, Sharks and Crocodiles not also showing this effect – and becoming ‘super’ Coelacanths, Sharks and Crocodiles?

The Coelecant has evolved. It is a completely different genus to it fossil cousins and has adapted to a deep water environment where it has survived so far, but in other waters coelacanths couldn't compete with other fish species that have long ago out competed it. Most coelecant genera have taken the most common evolutionary option an are now extinct.

Great Whites and Nile Crocodiles are already 'super'. They have found winning formula. The aquatic environment is very dynamic and competitive, unless you are a shark or crocodile, in which case the aquatic environment is a picnic, literally. Changing a winning formula is not likely produce anything radically better and there is no environmental pressure to select the changes.

And you haven't explained where all the limestone came from in the flood.

Assyrian

robindch

> [BrianCalgary] The Bible is not a math textbook. [...] never said that it was all to be taken
> literally. [...] I don't go to the bible for my science. Never have and never
> will. It doesn't claim to be a science book. [...] It isn't a science document.

A good position to hold. So, what do you think of those people who do actually believe that the bible is infallible on science? And who'll bend and ignore facts to "show" that it is?

J C

UU
Evidence from Palaeonology (Fossils): Geologists have found fossils of extinct species trapped in layers of sedimentary rock.

Yes, indeed Noah’s Flood was the greatest mass extinction event ever visited upon the Earth. Many species have also since disappeared and are now only known from their fossils.


UU
(let me guess, Creationists simply believe dinosaurs never existed even though there is so much evidence in front of their noses!)

Dinosaurs ARE referred to in the Bible – where they are called, among other things, 'Dragons' and 'Behemoth'. An accurate description of a Brachiosaurus-like Dinosaur and it’s habitat is contained in Job 40:15-24. The word “Dinosaur” doesn’t appear in the Bible because the name wasn’t invented until 1841 when Sir Richard Owen, first Superintendent of the British Museum (and a Creationist), coined the term Dinosaur from the Greek words meaning “terrible lizard” upon seeing some newly discovered fossil bones of an Iguanadon and a Megalosaurus.

UU
Therefore, via Carbon 14 Dating and the position of each layer, the age of a fossil can be estimated. Such as Dinosaurs

The half-life of C14 is only 5,730+/- 40 years. This means that after a maximum of about 50,000 years the trace levels of C14 would be very unreliable and with a very high error factor.

Radiocarbon dating is therefore only capable of accurately dating organic materials that are thousands of years old – and it is incapable of even theoretically measuring the ‘millions of years’ time-frame hypotheses of Evolution. Because Radiocarbon dating is necessarily confined to Carbon compounds it CANNOT be used to ‘age’ rocks or fossils.

Other radiometric dating methods are used to date rocks. However, these methods are based upon unproven assumptions about the radioactive content of the rock when it was formed, the belief that no radioactivity was added/subtracted externally throughout the period that that rock has existed and the assumption that the rate of change in the radioactive decay has remained constant. These unproven assumptions prevent any reliable dating conclusions being drawn – and there are many examples of known recently formed rocks being dated at millions of years old.
For example, rock samples taken from submarine lava flows from Kilauea volcano in Hawaii, which are known to have occurred in the 1950’s, have been radiometrically ‘dated’ at 4 million years old.
One of the reasons why nuclear decay rates in rocks can be ‘apparently altered’ dramatically is because the radioactive component being measured in the rock is differentially water soluble. For example, the leaching of water soluble Potassium salts within a rock can confound the Potassium/Argon test.


UU
Evidence from Biogeography: Pangea, the supercontinent, existed approx. 350 million years ago and started to split into the subcontinents of today. As a result, different variations of the same species were found in different continents separated by sea. Example, the Brown bear in Nothern Eurasia and the Black bear in North America.

Creation Scientists agree that the ante-diluvian world may have had only one landmass.
The different Bears are the result of speciation by isolation of the descendents of the original Bear Kind – using PRE-EXISTING genetic information.


UU
Evidence from Comparative Anatomy: Many organisms share a similiar internal skeletal structure. Such as the pentadactyl limb (five toed) of many mammals which contains the same sets of bones organised in similiar ways, despite their disimiliar functions. It is an example of a homologous structure that can be connected to a common ancestor. Examples; flippers in seals, arm + five fingered hand in humans.

The fact that homologous structures have dissimilar functions indicates a common designer, rather than a common ancestor.

The following quote from Prof Stephen Jay Gould, Late Professor of Geology and Palaeontology, Harvard University, is also pertinent when evaluating the common descent hypothesis:-
“The absence of fossil evidence for intermediary stages between major transitions in organ design, indeed our inability, even in our imagination, to construct functional intermediates in many cases, has been a persistent and nagging problem for gradualistic accounts of evolution."

UU
Evidence from Comparative Embryology: Ever see how similiar vertebrate embryos are in the early stages of their development? Is it just a coincidence that reptiles, birds, pigs, humans, etc. all possess tails, gill pouches and a backbone (notochord). Why do human embryos have gill slits when we don't have gills? Common Ancestor!

Modern Embryology has completely de-bunked Ernst Haeckel’s recapitulated embryo drawings as grossly inaccurate.

As far back as 1965 leading Evolutionist, Prof. Gaylord Simpson confirmed the invalidity of recapitulation on pp241 of An Introduction to Biology; Simpson & Beck when he said “It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny”.

The supposed ‘gill slits' of the Human Embryo are now known to be ‘pharyngeal clefts’ which delineate the development of the ear and throat. They develop into the Thymus Gland, Parathyroid Glands and the Middle Ear Canals none of which ever has any breathing function.

UU
Evidence from Gentics: Humans and other species still have many genes in common. For example, the last ancestor that yeast and humans shared lived many hundreds of millions of years ago. However more than 90% of their proteins and genes haven't changed. Consider cytochrome c, a protein involved in respiration, in species ranging from from bacteria to humans. In humans it consists of 104 amino acids.


Indeed, we are also all Carbon-based life forms.
The above evidence points to these creatures having a COMMON DESIGNER and NOT a common ancestor.
The fact that the observed differences in DNA sequence between supposedly ‘evolutionary close’ creatures are often quite large while the differences between supposedly ‘evolutionary distant’ organisms are sometimes small is another ‘nail in the coffin of Evolution’ so to speak.

If Evolution were true then the DNA sequences of supposedly ‘evolutionary close’ creatures SHOULD be almost identical – but Molecular Biology has discovered that this ISN’T always the case.

Slime Mould contains a protein that has gene sequences that are almost identical with Human Haemoglobin – but obviously this doesn’t mean that we are related to slime moulds.
It is indicative of a common designer – and NOT a common ancestor.

J C

UU
Do take my advice on board though that you should study Evolutionism just as I'm studying Creationism. That way, you'll have an understanding of different beliefs and even if you don't accept it at least you'll be informed and won't become intolerant of Evolutionists………

Good idea to be tolerant of Evolutionists!!!

Creation Science is the biggest washed-up crap that unholy fundalmentalist Christians in America attempt to disguise as a "Science" which is really an attack on Evolutionism.

Good idea to ALSO be tolerant of Creationists!!!!


UU
I do think it is ridiculous in many parts of the USA that Evolution isn't allowed to be taught in schools because the fundamentalists don't believe in it.

The current debate in the USA isn’t about the teaching of Evolution (which IS taught in ALL Public Schools) – it is about whether Intelligent Design CAN ALSO BE TAUGHT in these schools.

The Evolutionists argue (as they do on this thread) that ID could be taught in Religion Classes - but that it shouldn’t be taught in Science classes.

However, the fact that Religion Classes are NOT ALLOWED BY LAW in American Public Schools is a neat little Catch 22 for any alternatives to Evolution that are deemed to be ‘non-scientific’.
......and to date EVERY alternative to Materialistic Evolution (including Theistic Evolution) has been thus categorised!!!

Assyrian
I think the flood is one we know about from geology or archaeology, you don't get a serious flood like that without leaving traces.

How about ‘traces’ like mile-deep canyons gouged out by WATER, billions of dead things DROWNED and fossilised in mile deep WATER-SORTED sediment ALL OVER the Earth or enough SEA-WATER on the Earth to cover the entire planet to an average depth of 2.7 Kilometres (or 1.6 miles).


Assyrian
Examples found so far of preserved tissue are 20,000 years for mummified tissue and 40,000 years for frozen mammoth tissue.

Yes, maybe 20,000 years – but NOT 300 million years!!


Assyrian
Have they identified the sort of tissue in the TRex? Have they even identified it as tissue, rather than a squidgy material that 'looks like tissue' that they only found after soaking the bone in acid.

If it looks like tissue, feels like tissue and smells like tissue – it IS tissue!!!!

The stuff nearly squirted them in the eye when the T. Rex bone broke!!!


Assyrian
We can test for rate of decay in proteins, the racemization of amino acids. As you know amino acids in living organisms are all the left handed form. Over time this breaks down left-handed amino acids switch to the right handed, and visa versa, heading towards a 50:50 mix.

Q. How long does the ‘racemization of the proteins’ in a dead body take?

A. One week in hot weather!!!

The extraction of red blood cells and haemoglobin from (unfossilized) Dinosaur bone and the extraction of DNA fragments from insects trapped in supposedly multiple million year old amber indicates that these creatures were alive very recently indeed.

If these bones / insects were, in fact, millions of years old, all biological material in them would have completely disintegrated by now. The observed rates of biological degeneration would give maximal ages of a few thousand years for these bones / insects.

J C

Robin
So, what do you think of those people who do actually believe that the bible is infallible on science? And who'll bend and ignore facts to "show" that it is?

It is a ‘straw man’!!

The Bible may provide useful ideas to be tested scientifically against tangible evidence – but obviously it is not itself a part of the Scientific Method – and Creationists DO NOT CLAIM that it is.

As scientists we must always base our conclusions strictly on the repeated observation of tangible phenomena.

It is therefore important to differentiate between what we can only BELIEVE IN through FAITH and what we can SCIENTIFICALLY VERIFY by studying OBSERVABLE phenomena.

Could I point out that unless and until Science establishes a valid scientific theory about any phenomenon, the current popular explanation IS ALWAYS in the realm of faith.
For example, the atheistic BELIEF that God doesn’t exist and that life originated through spontaneous and exclusively natural processes is just that – a BELIEF, that is still in the realm of FAITH.
This fact hasn’t stopped Evolutionists utilising the Scientific Method to investigate their BELIEF in Materialistic Evolution – and I have no problem with them doing so.

However, ‘what is sauce for the Goose should be sauce for the Gander’ – Science is also capable of investigating the evidence for Creation – it is just the willingness to do so that is often lacking.

There ARE scientifically valid means of investigating whether ‘an external intelligence’ has been the cause of a particular effect. For example, Forensic Science is largely based upon assessing the evidence for the involvement of ‘external intelligent agents’ in crimes.

Equally the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Project validly claims to be a SCIENTIFICALLY BASED endeavour to investigate whether intelligence exists in other parts of the Universe. If we can reliably identify the symptoms and actions of intelligence in other parts of the Universe – then we can also do so with regard to any other tangible phenomenon, including life.

The ‘origins question’ is a classic “who done it?” type question – I suppose if you are an atheist, it is a “what done it?” question.
Either way, the appliance of Forensic Science to answering the question is possible. The massive research effort by Evolutionists and the current, very fruitful, research effort by Intelligent Design Proponents and Creation Scientists amply demonstrates that science HAS a definite role to play in answering the ‘origins question‘.

In fact, the major new insights provided by ‘cutting edge’ Molecular Biology have given Creation Science a great boost in recent years. This explains why Creation Science is currently enjoying such a resurgence in America, which is one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth – and it also explains why the Japanese are also beginning to take an active interest in Intelligent Design.

Practically every discovery from Critical Amino Acid Sequences to ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ to the amazing density and tight specificity of the information present in DNA has been absolutely devastating for Evolution and fully supportive of the Creation Hypothesis.

Zombrex

BrianCalgary wrote:

I guess God deemed a 3:1 to be a good point for accuracy. I think that only the mathematicians would get bent on this one.

Then God is very bad at maths.

A mathematician certainly would get bent on this one, its the wrong answer.

You can claim saying 2+2=5 is not that big a deal, its still the wrong answer. Not even God can make it a correct answer

BrianCalgary wrote:

4 and 2 would be way off.

3 is also "way off" in any meaningful manner. 2,3 and 4 are all equally wrong.

BrianCalgary wrote:

Well, next time I descvribe anything of a physiacl nature I will be sure to have my geometry set handy

I would hope so, otherwise what is the point?

BrianCalgary wrote:

Whether or not it was an exact circle or circular, the ratio was pretty close to 3:1.

Last time I check the entire argument for the Biblical account of creation was that it was exact. It is the word of God, and God doesn't make mistakes.

Now you are saying God gets things "pretty close" ..

BrianCalgary wrote:

God was not providing a blueprint or exact instruction on how to build it.

Why not?

Why say 3 when it is incorrect and 3.14 or even 3.1 would do? Why not simply state what it is if God knows?

If God is not providing a correct answer on this topic, how do you know "he" is providing a correct answer on creation?

BrianCalgary wrote:

The Bible is not a math textbook.

That God for that (excuse the pun), since it gets even basic maths wrong. Its not a maths book because it gets the most simplest maths wrong. Its not a science book because it get simple since wrong. Therefore it should influence neither field of study.

BrianCalgary wrote:

never said that it was all to be taken literally. There are parts that are, the history and life instructions as two examples. There is some metaphor and symbolism which can't be taken literally. The six days of creation are I believe to be historical as Peter talks about Adam as an historical figure.

So part of it are the exact word of God and parts aren't? That doesn't really make much sense now does it?

Zombrex

J C wrote:

These unproven assumptions prevent any reliable dating conclusions being drawn – and there are many examples of known recently formed rocks being dated at millions of years old.

JC you are talking nonsense again.

Radiometeric dating has been proven time and time again. The handful of times it has given incorrect results is out weighted by the huge amount of times it has given correct independently verified results.

Besides that, it isn't the only system used. Before radiometeric dating was even invented scientists were grouping fossils around age based on the layers of rock they were found in.

Three questions for you Flood idea ...

1) If the "Flood" wiped out all life at the same time, why are certain fossils from certain creatures nearly always found in the same depth of layers of rocks? Since the 19th century scientists have been able to build up a record of time periods in the Earth based on the fact that certain fossils from certain animals show up in the same time layers, the same time period. That would be impossible if they all died at once, they would be found jumbled up all over the place. They aren't

2) Why did all the marine animals die in the bibical Flood? Why did they all die at the same time? Why if they died all at the same time is it possible to build up a detailed time line based on the levels that certain creatures are found in. Why are marine animal fossils discovered in the middle of land masses if they died 12,000 years ago.

2) It has never been explained by Biblical Creationists how a ecosystem could be supported with all these creatures running around at the same time. Taking simply dinosars, there are simply too many known dinosars to be alive at one single point in time, let allow all the fish, birds and mammals that also must have been alive at the time. There are over 800 know dinosar species, the estimate based on other species put the possible number of dinosar species between 8,000 to as high as 45,000 over the 160 million years they existed. Assuming then that it wasn't 160 million years, but actually only 12,000 years ago we are talking about millions of individual dinosars here JC, roaming the earth with all the other mamals, reptiles and of course man. A ecosystem supporting all these creatures at any one time is impossible, aside from being completely ridiculous

Scofflaw

J C wrote:

The Evolutionists argue (as they do on this thread) that ID could be taught in Religion Classes - but that it shouldn’t be taught in Science classes.

However, the fact that Religion Classes are NOT ALLOWED BY LAW in American Public Schools is a neat little Catch 22 for any alternatives to Evolution that are deemed to be ‘non-scientific’!!!

To be fair, most people outside the US wouldn't be aware of that. After all, I was taught about Creationism at school in biology class, and about evolution in RE. One forgets the States is so dogmatic about ensuring that there is no established religion.

J C wrote:

How about ‘traces’ like mile-deep canyons gouged out by WATER, billions of dead things DROWNED and fossilised in mile deep WATER-SORTED sediment ALL OVER the Earth or enough SEA-WATER on the Earth to cover the entire planet to an average depth of 2.7 Kilometres (or 1.6 miles).

Unfortunately, JC appears to know no geology. The proof of the pudding is easily seen - neither the oil industry nor the mining industry base what they do on "Flood geology", because it isn't worth a tuppenny fart when it comes to actually finding oil or minerals.

J C wrote:

Assyrian: Have they identified the sort of tissue in the TRex? Have they even identified it as tissue, rather than a squidgy material that 'looks like tissue' that they only found after soaking the bone in acid.

If it looks like tissue, feels like tissue and smells like tissue – it IS tissue!!!!

The stuff nearly squirted them in the eye when the T. Rex bone broke!!!

Assyrian is entirely correct, and JC's little dramatic bit about the "stuff nearly squirting them in the eye" is 100% made up. To quote from the Smithsonian report:

In 2000, Bob Harmon, a field crew chief from the Museum of the Rockies, was eating his lunch in a remote Montana canyon when he looked up and saw a bone sticking out of a rock wall. That bone turned out to be part of what may be the best preserved T. rex in the world. Over the next three summers, workers chipped away at the dinosaur, gradually removing it from the cliff face. They called it B. rex in Harmon’s honor and nicknamed it Bob. In 2001, they encased a section of the dinosaur and the surrounding dirt in plaster to protect it. The package weighed more than 2,000 pounds, which turned out to be just above their helicopter’s capacity, so they split it in half. One of B. rex’s leg bones was broken into two big pieces and several fragments—just what Schweitzer needed for her micro-scale explorations.

Further from that article, in what is perhaps an apposite quote for our thread:

Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have been using antibodies to chicken collagen, cow elastin and ostrich hemoglobin to search for similar molecules in the dinosaur tissue. At an October 2005 paleontology conference, Schweitzer presented preliminary evidence that she has detected real dinosaur proteins in her specimens.

Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

Schweitzer’s research has been hijacked by “young earth” creationists, who insist that dinosaur soft tissue couldn’t possibly survive millions of years. They claim her discoveries support their belief, based on their interpretation of Genesis, that the earth is only a few thousand years old. Of course, it’s not unusual for a paleontologist to differ with creationists. But when creationists misrepresent Schweitzer’s data, she takes it personally: she describes herself as “a complete and total Christian.” On a shelf in her office is a plaque bearing an Old Testament verse: “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Young-earth creationists first seized upon Schweitzer’s work after she wrote an article for the popular science magazine Earth in 1997 about possible red blood cells in her dinosaur specimens. Creation magazine claimed that Schweitzer’s research was “powerful testimony against the whole idea of dinosaurs living millions of years ago. It speaks volumes for the Bible’s account of a recent creation.”

This drives Schweitzer crazy. Geologists have established that the Hell Creek Formation, where B. rex was found, is 68 million years old, and so are the bones buried in it. She’s horrified that some Christians accuse her of hiding the true meaning of her data. “They treat you really bad,” she says. “They twist your words and they manipulate your data.” For her, science and religion represent two different ways of looking at the world; invoking the hand of God to explain natural phenomena breaks the rules of science. After all, she says, what God asks is faith, not evidence. “If you have all this evidence and proof positive that God exists, you don’t need faith. I think he kind of designed it so that we’d never be able to prove his existence. And I think that’s really cool.”

J C wrote:

Assyrian
We can test for rate of decay in proteins, the racemization of amino acids. As you know amino acids in living organisms are all the left handed form. Over time this breaks down left-handed amino acids switch to the right handed, and visa versa, heading towards a 50:50 mix.

Q. How long does the ‘racemization of the proteins’ in a dead body take?

A. One week in hot weather!!!

Here I think JC is quoting Duane Gish. The rates are highly variable, but racemisation is basically too quick a process to be applied to a 68 Ma fossil - it has a maximum span of about 10,000 years.

J C wrote:

The extraction of red blood cells and haemoglobin from (unfossilized) Dinosaur bone and the extraction of DNA fragments from insects trapped in supposedly multiple million year old amber indicates that these creatures were alive very recently indeed.

If these bones / insects were, in fact, millions of years old, all biological material in them would have completely disintegrated by now. The observed rates of biological degeneration would give maximal ages of a few thousand years for these bones / insects.

The extraction of a few tiny remnants of altered organic material from (fossilised) dinosaur bone tells us that we don't know everything we think we know about decay, although we do know that it's not a linear process, as JC seems to assume. Where does JC get his so-definite figures about rates of organic decay? I am afraid they must be made up to fit the Biblical timescale, since JC would be the first to admit that he doesn't trust the conventional dating techniques that would be required to date the specimens to give the rates he quotes!


regards,
Scofflaw

Scofflaw

Wicknight wrote:

2) It has never been explained by Biblical Creationists how a ecosystem could be supported with all these creatures running around at the same time. Taking simply dinosars, there are simply too many known dinosars to be alive at one single point in time, let allow all the fish, birds and mammals that also must have been alive at the time. There are over 800 know dinosar species, the estimate based on other species put the possible number of dinosar species between 8,000 to as high as 45,000 over the 160 million years they existed. Assuming then that it wasn't 160 million years, but actually only 12,000 years ago we are talking about millions of individual dinosars here JC, roaming the earth with all the other mamals, reptiles and of course man. A ecosystem supporting all these creatures at any one time is impossible, aside from being completely ridiculous

Wasn't there an estimate that if all the creatures found fossilised were all alive at the same time, they'd be packed a couple per square metre over the entire surface of the earth (that's without assuming they represent a tiny fraction of those actually alive)? Mind you, if they all relieved themselves at the same time, you would have a bit of a global flood...

JC wrote:

In fact, the major new insights provided by ‘cutting edge’ Molecular Biology have given Creation Science a great boost in recent years. This explains why Creation Science is currently enjoying such a resurgence in America, which is one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth – and it also explains why the Japanese are also beginning to take an active interest in Intelligent Design.

Sigh. There is one Japanese academic who's "interested". However, by the standards of Creationist Science, I guess that could equally well mean the entire Japanese nation have become Baptists. Really, it's tiresome just correcting JC's misinformation and propaganda - you have to do it post after post, because otherwise he just slips it in as if it had never been corrected. I'd quite like a smiley like the little yellow warning triangle so I could just quote his posts and flag the dishonesty:

JC wrote:

Practically every discovery from Critical Amino Acid Sequences to ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ to the amazing density and tight specificity of the information present in DNA has been absolutely devastating for Evolution and fully supportive of the Creation Hypothesis.

Thus for example, the first triangle refers to the fact that no-one else but JC seems to know about these Critical Amino Acid Sequences (no references have ever been provided, despite this being a "major discovery"), and the second refers to the fact that JC is ignoring the approximately 45% of the human genome which has no known function, and is commonly referred to as "junk DNA" - certainly if I had a computer program which contained 45% junk code I would hesitate to describe it as being "tightly specified". Unless of course I was trying to sell it to the ignorant...

If you'd like to read some really smooth Creationist writing, I can strongly recommend this PDF. It works extremely well, but I find it interesting that it seems to be written c. 2000, but references the state of play on some major issues (intermediate forms) of some 30 years ago, conveniently ignoring the massive increase of discoveries since. The author sounds entirely believable on the absence of the mutation mechanism - for example:

Mutations are very rare, not common. How often do random mutations occur? Francisco J. Ayala,evolutionary geneticist of the University of California, has written: “It is probably fair to estimate the frequency of a majority of mutations in higher organisms between one in ten thousand and one in a million per gene per generation” (1970, p. 3). The evolutionists themselves frankly and candidly admit what every research biologist knows: mutations occur rarely, and when they do, they are entirely random.

unless you know that humans (for example) contain c.100,000 genes, and that sperm have gone through 430 "generations" by the time a man is 30. Plus, of course, it's a 30-year old quote again. Anyway, it's extremely smooth, and a good example of what you can do by leaving out the exclamation marks.

cordially,
Scofflaw

pH

I'm wondering what anyone claiming a young earth thinks of Plate Tectonics and Pangaea.

It is a remarkable theory, that explains a huge number of geological features, and is 100% verified by modern GPS measurements. None of this is possible unless the age of the earth is *at least* 180 million years.

We have direct and verifiable evidence of at least 180 million years of continents moving around.

So how do you go about 'debunking' this theory? Do you just go to answersingenenesis, search and copy and paste stuff here?

Zombrex

pH wrote:

I'm wondering what anyone claiming a young earth thinks of Plate Tectonics and Pangaea.

As they do with anything else that doesn't fit into the Bible, they claim simply and straight-faced that "God did it". God simply made all the land masses move, because he wanted to.

Kinda hard to argue with that logic

pH

Wicknight wrote:

As they do with anything else that doesn't fit into the Bible, they claim simply and straight-faced that "God did it". God simply made all the land masses move, because he wanted to.

Kinda hard to argue with that logic

That's not entirely true, they (creationists) could just claim that 'God done it' in terms of life also, yet they insist on making pseudo-scientific claims (Intelligent Design) and debunking evolutionary theory.

Has a creation-scientist 'proved' that Australia couldn't possibly have gotten to where it is today without God pushing it around a bit?

Scofflaw

pH wrote:

That's not entirely true, they (creationists) could just claim that 'God done it' in terms of life also, yet they insist on making pseudo-scientific claims (Intelligent Design) and debunking evolutionary theory.

Has a creation-scientist 'proved' that Australia couldn't possibly have gotten to where it is today without God pushing it around a bit?

Sure - but that's because ID is specifically designed to slip Creationism into science classes.

Apparently, the continents all moved during the Flood, reaching their present positions in a matter of months, according to some "Creation scientists", although others claim:

‘The geology has refuted plate-tectonic interpretations time and again in the Appalachians. Geology often refutes plate tectonics. So the plate-tectonics boys tend to ignore data. The horror is the ignoring of basic facts, not bothering to be constrained by data.’

Rather amusingly, the second group claim there's no evidence for subduction (rather, that the evidence contradicts it). They also make the following pair of claims, which are rather extraordinary when taken together:

All these complications point to another mechanism. Vertical tectonics in which the island arc represents upwelling of hot mantle, while the trench and Wadati-Benioff zone represent a response to this upwelling, seems to fit most of the observations, including heat flow data and gravity anomalies.

The explanation of mountain building is supposed to be one of the great achievements of plate tectonics. However, a close look reveals many serious problems. First, it is difficult to relate all mountains, volcanoes and deep basins in intracontinental areas to ancient plate tectonics. Secondly, the melting and bubbling up of magma from the subduction zone starting about 100 km deep has troublesome scientific problems, such as how does the liquid gather together and make room for itself? The great chain of the Andes Mountains was supposedly made in this way, but the plate tectonics model is hard pressed to explain this.

In other words, they don't think plate tectonics can explain how magma can rise in its version, but they are using magma rise as their substitute for plate tectonics, without explaining how magma can rise.

And they wonder why the oil and mineral industries don't use this Biblical pseudo-science?

cordially,
Scofflaw

Zombrex

pH wrote:

That's not entirely true, they (creationists) could just claim that 'God done it' in terms of life also, yet they insist on making pseudo-scientific claims (Intelligent Design) and debunking evolutionary theory

But that is the same as saying "God did it"

I've never heard a creationist explain what exactly God did do, but I imagine they assume that somewhere God magically moved something, or sparked something that set off a chain of events that lead to life.

Or the young Earth creationists, the more fundamentalist Bible followers, simply claim God made life out of thin air, one minute there was no life, then all species that existed were just "there"

J C

Scofflaw
JC's little dramatic bit about the "stuff nearly squirting them in the eye" is 100% made up.
Scofflaw (quoting from the T.Rex discovery Report)
Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex

Blood vessels, bone building cells and connective tissue no less !!

Sounds like my claim that the stuff nearly squirted them in the eye when the T. Rex bone was broken is indeed very close to reality – and not in the least figurative.

Health and safety should provide full ‘bio-hazard’ equipment for ALL future T. Rex fossil hunting expeditions!!!


Scofflaw (quoting from the T.Rex discovery Report)
Further discoveries in the past year have shown that the discovery of soft tissue in B. rex wasn’t just a fluke. Schweitzer and Wittmeyer have now found probable blood vessels, bone-building cells and connective tissue in another T. rex, in a theropod from Argentina and in a 300,000-year-old woolly mammoth fossil. Schweitzer’s work is “showing us we really don’t understand decay,” Holtz says. “There’s a lot of really basic stuff in nature that people just make assumptions about.”

I have already told you that Creation Science is aware of NUMEROUS discoveries of soft tissue in fossilised specimens – and you didn’t believe me – perhaps you will now believe me as this Evolutionist Report confirms that the T.Rex tissue discovery ISN’T a once-off fluke.

What Evolutionists REALLY don’t understand ISN’T decay – it is the fact that these fossils AREN’T remotely as old as they have believed them to be!!!


Scofflaw
The rates are highly variable, but racemisation is basically too quick a process to be applied to a 68 Ma fossil - it has a maximum span of about 10,000 years.

Got it in one Scofflaw!!

This T.Rex was less than 10,000 years old!!!


Wicknight
If the "Flood" wiped out all life at the same time, why are certain fossils from certain creatures nearly always found in the same depth of layers of rocks? Since the 19th century scientists have been able to build up a record of time periods in the Earth based on the fact that certain fossils from certain animals show up in the same time layers, the same time period. That would be impossible if they all died at once, they would be found jumbled up all over the place. They aren't

Part of the problem in INTERPRETING the fossil record is that the particular ‘stretch’ of the fossil record in a rock is used to ‘date’ that particular rock from an evolutionary point of view. There is a form of circular reasoning operating here – the ‘index fossil’ found is used to ‘date’ the rock and then the rock's apparent ‘age’ is used to ‘date’ the other fossils found in it.
Please note that it is more likely that the index fossil may be an indicator of the position of itself and the surrounding fossils in the order of 'Flood Burial' rather that indicating the ‘age’ of the rock at all.

We see representative species of all of the types of creatures found at all levels in the Geological Column ALIVE today – and there is obviously NO ‘age’ differences between them.
The idea that when you find the fossil of a ‘primitive’ creature you can assume that the rock in which it is found is very old is obviously invalid – it might only have been fossilised one thousand years ago, in a localised catastrophe, for all you know.

Observed reality indicates that when an animal dies, it decomposes with its soft tissue disappearing rapidly (within hours or days). Equally, scavengers ensure that even bones are rapidly ‘recycled’. Therefore the only way that the amazingly perfect fossils that we observe in rocks (and especially actual tissue as in the T. Rex find) could be preserved is through instantaneous or almost instantaneous burial. The significant scale of fossil deposition worldwide indicates a massive catastrophic burial of organisms under sediments suspended in massive quantities of water – which provides strong circumstantial evidence for a worldwide flood catastrophe.


Wicknight
Why did all the marine animals die in the bibical Flood? Why did they all die at the same time? Why if they died all at the same time is it possible to build up a detailed time line based on the levels that certain creatures are found in. Why are marine animal fossils discovered in the middle of land masses if they died 12,000 years ago.

ALL marine animals DIDN’T die in the Flood – but substantial numbers did die – due to smothering and burial in huge sedimentation events as the Flood processes unfolded.

The so-called ‘Geological Column’ is patently not a record of the evolution of life but it does show the expected order of burial in a flood catastrophe i.e. smaller sea floor creatures and flocculated micro-plankton on the bottom ranging up to larger land-based animals (who were able to flee to higher ground) on the top. Similar fossils are found together because of their three-dimensional ‘position’ in the ‘ecological column’ so to speak. Equally, their hydrological characteristics such as shape, size, etc also explains some of the finds where movement and water sorting is a feature of the deposit.

The situation observed in Marine environments today is that the more ‘primitive’ creatures in general are bottom dwellers with the more sophisticated top predators swimming in the upper reaches of the sea. Large marine animals that happened to be swimming on the bottom would have fled upwards as the earth movements of the Flood released vast quantities of Calcium Carbonate onto the sea floor and/or sediment began to be deposited there by the run-off from land as the Flood processes gained momentum.

Marine fossils are sometimes found in the centre of modern landmasses because these areas were uplifted during the later stages of Noah’s Flood. Features with sheer cliff faces, like the White Cliffs of Dover, are examples of decidedly dramatic uplifts – and NOT gradualist processes.


Wicknight
It has never been explained by Biblical Creationists how a ecosystem could be supported with all these creatures running around at the same time. Taking simply dinosars, there are simply too many known dinosars to be alive at one single point in time, let allow all the fish, birds and mammals that also must have been alive at the time. There are over 800 know dinosar species, the estimate based on other species put the possible number of dinosar species between 8,000 to as high as 45,000 over the 160 million years they existed. Assuming then that it wasn't 160 million years, but actually only 12,000 years ago we are talking about millions of individual dinosars here JC, roaming the earth with all the other mamals, reptiles and of course man. A ecosystem supporting all these creatures at any one time is impossible, aside from being completely ridiculous

Our current ecosystem quite readily supports many billions of individuals within millions of different species and varieties. The ante-diluvian world was much more hospitable to life. Such was the perfection of Humans, that Adam lived for 930 years – and indeed Gen 9:29 confirms that Noah himself lived to the ripe old age of 950. Under these circumstances, other living creatures could also be expected to be very abundant.

The ageing process greatly accelerated in the immediate aftermath of Noah’s Flood and this is explained by some Creation Scientists to be, in part due, to an increase in incident solar radiation upon the Earth due to the collapse of a postulated ‘water canopy’ in the upper atmosphere that covered the entire Earth before the Flood. This ‘water canopy’ could also have maintained a ‘greenhouse effect’ and a stable warm climate all over the Earth – and this could explain the presence of fossilized tropical vegetation, which has been found in the polar regions. Please also note that such a ‘water canopy’ could allow sunlight in at levels that would produce photosynthesis rates greatly in excess of the compensation point of plants.
Additional sources of radiation could have been released from deep within the Earth during the massive upheavals that were evidently caused by Noah’s Flood – thereby further shortening lifespans. Please note that all of the above is speculative and subject to active ongoing Creation Science research.


Scofflaw
Wasn't there an estimate that if all the creatures found fossilised were all alive at the same time, they'd be packed a couple per square metre over the entire surface of the earth

I don’t know where you came up with that estimate – the fossils, although locally numerous in some fossil beds, are a relative rarity in the totality of all sedimentary rocks.

However, you do have a point, in another way.
If Dinosaurs were around for 100 million years and other creatures for a lot longer, the whole world should be a veritable ‘charnel house’. If fossilisation is indeed the result of gradual ongoing processes then people should be literally tripping over bones in their front gardens and sedimentary rock should be little more than assemblages of bone held together with small quantity of sediment!!!!

J C

Scofflaw
no-one else but JC seems to know about these Critical Amino Acid Sequences (no references have ever been provided, despite this being a "major discovery"),

Try Googling the words “critical amino acid sequence” – last time I did it I got over 100 hits.

When I removed the inverted commas I got over 9 million!!.


Scofflaw
JC is ignoring the approximately 45% of the human genome which has no known function, and is commonly referred to as "junk DNA" - certainly if I had a computer program which contained 45% junk code I would hesitate to describe it as being "tightly specified".

If I had a computer with 45% junk code I would hesitate to call it a COMPUTER!!!!

So-called “junk DNA” is DNA for which no function has yet been established. The size of the figure (at 45%) is a measure of our collective ignorance, as life scientists, of DNA and how it actually operates.
Victorian scientists had a similar problem, with a large number of anatomical structures – and they disguised their lack of knowledge by regarding them as ‘vestigial organs’.

The latest research into how DNA actually works shows massively complex and little understood interactions between different DNA strands as well as frame shifting abilities of mind numbing complexity. In addition, the exact same DNA sequence can specify completely different structures in different organisms.

There are also sophisticated DNA ‘auto-repair’ systems and the entire cellular replication process is physically assisted and chemically catalysed by a whole host of other ‘molecular machines’.
It is as if we ‘climbed Mount Everest’ when we decoded the Human Genome only to find an even higher ‘mountain’ of complex DNA interactions awaiting us when we got there.

All of these information-packed systems are objective proof of the appliance of enormous levels ‘external intelligence’ and they certainly couldn’t possibly have arisen from undirected ‘natural’ processes such as those postulated by Evolution.

The hard drive of your computer may indeed contain large amounts of junk – but the Operating System, which is the real analogy to DNA. is tightly specified – and any junk in here is likely to lead to catastrophic failure AKA ‘crashing’ in computers and ‘death’ in living organisms.

Zombrex

J C wrote:

Part of the problem in INTERPRETING the fossil record is that the particular ‘stretch’ of the fossil record in a rock is used to ‘date’ that particular rock from an evolutionary point of view.

No, its not. You are talking scientific nonsense again JC.

For a start you don't need to know the date of the rock, you just need to know its position relative to the other rocks layer. And low and behold the same species consistantly appear in the same position of rock layer even over large distances apart. That makes absolutely no sense if they all died at the same time JC.

J C wrote:

We see representative species of all of the types of creatures found at all levels in the Geological Column ALIVE today – and there is obviously NO ‘age’ differences between them.

No we don't, that is complete nonsense.

As I said, geologiest do not rely solely on the species of fossil found in rock to date it. If they did your argument might makes sense, but they don't so the dates of the fossils are independently verified.

Also you still haven't answered my question, how do you explain the ordered layering of fossil in side rock layers if they all died at the same time?

J C wrote:

ALL marine animals DIDN’T die in the Flood – but substantial numbers did die – due to smothering and burial in huge sedimentation events as the Flood processes unfolded.

What? Now you are taking the piss.

There is not nearly enough "sediment" on Earth to bury all perihistoric sea creates. There isn't 1% of the sediment need to do that. Seriously are you just making this sh*t up as you go along?

J C wrote:

The so-called ‘Geological Column’ is patently not a record of the evolution of life but it does show the expected order of burial in a flood catastrophe i.e.

The "Geological Column" as you incorrectly call it, is not made up of sediment JC. It is made up of solid structured layers of rock. The pressures required to construct these rocks in the time period you claim would be greater than any force known to exist on Earth. You are talking nonsense. These could not form under "Flood" contitions. If they could you would have massive pressure at the bottom of the ocean. You don't, you can sit on the bottom in a small sub JC.

You are simply showing your ignorance of even basic leaving cert geology.

J C wrote:

Our current ecosystem quite readily supports many billions of individuals within millions of different species and varieties. The ante-diluvian world was much more hospitable to life. Such was the perfection of Humans, that Adam lived for 930 years – and indeed Gen 9:29 confirms that Noah himself lived to the ripe old age of 950. Under these circumstances, other living creatures could also be expected to be very abundant.

Not top of the food chain dinosars JC that is ridiculous. And certainly not millions of them. They would simply eat everything else! :rolleyes:

Scofflaw

J C wrote:

Scofflaw
no-one else but JC seems to know about these Critical Amino Acid Sequences (no references have ever been provided, despite this being a "major discovery"),

Try Googling the words “critical amino acid sequence” – last time I did it I got over 100 hits.

When I removed the inverted commas I got over 9 million!!.

Yes, I got 104 results (5 of them are this thread itself). The rest are using the words "critical amino acid sequence", but this is not some kind of special term - it's what's called "part of a sentence" - in some cases it may even be the critical part of the sentence. One thing it definitely is not is some kind of "major discovery".

And 9 million hits without the commas....oooh. Are there really 9 million web pages that contain the words "amino" or "acid" or "critical", or "sequence"? That's...well, what can I say?

J C wrote:

If Dinosaurs were around for 100 million years and other creatures for a lot longer, the whole world should be a veritable ‘charnel house’. If fossilisation is indeed the result of gradual ongoing processes then people should be literally tripping over bones in their front gardens and sedimentary rock should be little more than assemblages of bone held together with small quantity of sediment!!!!

Why? Fossilisation is known to be a rare event - much as any kind of accidental preservation is known to be. Plus you're obviously unaware that there are limestones which exactly match your description - chalk being a good example?

J C wrote:

If I had a computer with 45% junk code I would hesitate to call it a COMPUTER!!!!

The hard drive of your computer may indeed contain large amounts of junk – but the Operating System, which is the real analogy to DNA. is tightly specified – and any junk in here is likely to lead to catastrophic failure AKA ‘crashing’ in computers and ‘death’ in living organisms.

OK. You're not running Windows, then?

Do please take some time out to read up on some basic science, JC. Maybe some computer science while you're at it.

Scofflaw

Zombrex

J C wrote:

and they certainly couldn’t possibly have arisen from undirected ‘natural’ processes such as those postulated by Evolution.

Not only is it possible, it is likely.

Once you have a self replicating molecule (admitable an unlikely event, but then we did have an entire planet full of unstable molecules, and powerful energy source and 1.5 billion years), natural selection will produce very complex and structured organic systems. It takes fecking ages (it took another 2.5 billion years to get from a self-replicating molecule to a single cell) but it is predictable that it will happen.

JC how many times to I have to explain this to you, this has been understood and modelled for years. There are a large number of theories as to how this can happen. We don't know which one actually took place, but they all work as models. All of them could have produced organic systems naturally once the first self replicating molecules are created. There is no mystery beyond which one was actually used by nature.

There is very little mystery to evolution once you have a self replicating molecule. And a self replicating molecule is not complex, so even if you believe for religous reasons that God must have produced the first self replicating molecules that is not complex design, it is very simple hand-up design. Once the molecule has been created NS will do the rest in a couple of billion years.

The fact that these are very complex systems is not evidence of external "design" in any shape or form. They were "designed" (for lack of a better word) by natural selection.

Your whole argument is like looking at the Horse Nebula and saying "umm, that kinda looks like a horse, the odds of it turning out like a horse are huge, therefore someone must have made it look like that. There must is a God"

Zombrex

J C wrote:

Practically every discovery from Critical Amino Acid Sequences to ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ to the amazing density and tight specificity of the information present in DNA has been absolutely devastating for Evolution and fully supportive of the Creation Hypothesis.

What are you talking about??

The theory of "Mitochondrial Eve" (the the companion theory of Y-chromosone Adam) disproves nearly everything that Young Earth Creationists like yourself claim, from the date of the earth, the biblical idea of Adam and Eve, to the Biblical Flood :rolleyes:

Zombrex

For anyone interested this is an excellent article on the current state of the Evolution vs Creationism "war"

http://skepdic.com/intelligentdesign.html

It is interesting for a number of points

- Evolution doesn't disprove or prove "God". All it does is provide a plasuable process that life can develop by. That might make God unnecessary to some, but that ain't science's problem

- Creationism is metaphysics, not science. It is actually dealing with the "why", not the "how". Creationism deals with questions that cannot be answered. As the author points out there is absolutely no reason to believe that God did not design the entire universe from the Big Bang to produce life. He could have used macro-evolution to do this. He could have used the laws of chemistry to produce the first organic molecules. Or God might not exist and the whole thing happened naturally. We cannot know this, it is philisophy and metaphysics, not science. Science is concerned with the "how", not the "why"

- Because Creationism is metaphysics, and as such can have no proper evidence for it, ID/Creationists have focused on attacking and discrediting evolution. They are under the very mistaken belief that if evolution is shown to be wrong their theories are given legitamacy. That of course is nonsense, disproving one theory does not scientifical prove another competting theory. But they continue. One tactic is to constantly referr to the "crisis" taking place in science over evolution (I notice JC does this to). In fact there is no crisis taking place in the scientific community over evolution. Evolution has been an accepted, verified, well understood theory for the last 100 years.

BrianCalgary

robindch wrote:

> [BrianCalgary] The Bible is not a math textbook. [...] never said that it was all to be taken
> literally. [...] I don't go to the bible for my science. Never have and never
> will. It doesn't claim to be a science book. [...] It isn't a science document.

A good position to hold. So, what do you think of those people who do actually believe that the bible is infallible on science? And who'll bend and ignore facts to "show" that it is?

They are wacky. But on the issue of Creation the account in the Bible is a description of a historical event. The scientists who study such things, and this is my objection, do not take into account the possibility that God is the creator and that hHe did do it in 6 days as stated.