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The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.

The difference is HUGE. We can actually recreate events for a crime scene for example, but we CANNOT recreate the universe (and all the computer models in the world cannot reduplicate this other than imaginatively programming a computer to simulate whatever they think are the factors involved -- which are always too few and too controlled). Creation (and everything prior to Adam IMO) are events that are well beyond our knowledge and therefore require special revelation. The 'fact' that rocks and decaying matter may give off certain dates is the result of interpretation and not actually being a witness to the objects origination. There are FAR too many variables to simply accept the dates that are suggested by the various methods (not to mention the fact that dates quickly stretch into ranges growing SIGNIFICANTLY longer and longer the further one is proposing something should be dated -- but hey...who would really notice if we're only suggesting a margin of error in the millions to billions of years ). For instance, all that science can really say is that given the readings for radiometric dating X to Y amount of years are suggested given what we currently know and experience concerning the isotopes. But NO the scientific community is not so humble as that...instead they preach their mantra of certainty concerning the creation and 'evolution'. While I do appreciate the fact that we can all discuss these things (charitably and humbly even sometimes), yet I still find these discussions in this type of a format to be largely counterproductive, but thank you all for the joust .

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Everyone is equal at the foot of the cross...just some are more equal than others.
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We CAN witness Suns and solar systems, and galaxies forming and dying (in many, many, different stages). There is no reason to suppose our humble neighborhood is any different from the rest of the cosmos.

Often Science is blamed for media "pop science." Individual scientists often encourage more grant money by dramatizing science. I watched a NOVA program where the premise was, "Can we find evidence of the life that once existed on Mars?" Well, they never established that Mars had life in the first place! Duh! This is where some science PR gets sneaky! This kind of thing would be destroyed by competitive peer review.
Scientists are at each others throats and jump at the opportunity to tear apart a rival or a theory. They could care less about the bible for the most part. It is not us vs. them!

Sorry, the most feeble attempts at pseudo science are by highly biased religious groups. It's common sense and the motives, no matter how well intentioned, are obvious. Bad science.....

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Behold, now is "THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,"
behold, now is "THE DAY OF SALVATION" --
The apostle Paul, NASB

I am trying to visualize an analogy to the position some people are taking on this thread.

Perhaps it's like this:
1) There is a house in Atlanta in August (that's a hot time). The electricity is disconnected.
2) Person A and Person B tell me that nobody has entered that house in 5 months.
3) We walk in the hot house together, enter the kitchen, and see a tall glass of iced tea on the kitchen table. There are unmelted ice cubes in the glass, a fresh looking lemon slice on the rim, some condensate on the outside of the glass and a little bit of water on the bottom edge of the glass.
4) I say "someone must have been here, I can draw conclusions about the age of the glass of iced tea from the decay coefficients of the cubes and the temperature of the brown liquid."
5) Person A and Person B say "no, we can't know someone has been here. No one was here to see them and record it, the decay coefficients might not be constant over time, those measurements of yours could be wrong."

Now, suppose Person A and B had something really important to share with me, like the gospel -- I'd be reluctant to accept anything they say.

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Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

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The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.

spoken like the true sceptic you are -- fortunately, Jesus Found a way to reach you that (presumably) didn't involve person A or B

am very thankful (& humbled) that God Knows how to get His Message across despite us funky human folk -- nevertheless, we must still study to show ourselves approved & have an answer ready for those who ask about this whole God scene

DB -- my experiences have been "credible" but speaking in person is far different than a forum -- plus the whole evolution scene isn't that imp to many, even the numerous college crews i hung with -- in my limited experience, it's only been a major issue between Christians

"4) I say "someone must have been here, I can draw conclusions about the age of the glass of iced tea from the decay coefficients of the cubes and the temperature of the brown liquid."

Hey Cobra,
"Decay coefficients of the cubes?"
Spoken like a true engineer! That, or you are a true connoisseur of iced tea as only a southerner can be. I was debating whether the speaker was Sherlock Holmes or Spock! lol

Dr. McCoy:
"Dammit, Jim, It's just a glass of tea!"


S

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Behold, now is "THE ACCEPTABLE TIME,"
behold, now is "THE DAY OF SALVATION" --
The apostle Paul, NASB

We're firmly agreed that the difference is huge, then. You're arguing that it's a difference in quality as well as in quantity, whereas I'm making the case that it's 'just' (!) a difference in quantity. A big deal, yes, but not the kind of deal you're making out.

At only a few weeks' remove, we can't even genuinely recreate the events at a crime scene, notwithstanding that in everyday language that's what we might say. What we do (or the police do on our behalf) is set up a scenario which has whatever features of the original event that we think are important, and hope that it's close enough to jog the memory of a witness to the actual occurrences. This sort of thing is presumably worth doing, but it has a great deal more in common with a computer model than you were giving it credit for.

The case for an old, old earth isn't so much built on computer simulations, though, but on methods more akin to the weighing of evidence found in old-fashioned detective work.

Firstly, I don't think this distinction you're drawing, between evidence-from-a-witness and evidence-that-has-to-be-interpreted, is as real as you want it to be. When you listen to a human witness, you have to come to a view on how credible they are: are they likely to have a bias? ...an axe to grind? ...can they have seen what they thought they saw? ...how have they interpreted what they saw? ...does it match with other evidence? ...and so on. In fact, all evidence gets interpreted in one way or another, witness evidence just as much as footprints or DNA traces.

Secondly, what might these 'far too many variables' be, then? When people select samples for radiometric dating, they do take a certain amount of care to choose ones that have clearly been undisturbed since they were formed, and are uncontaminated. Having taken care of that (with the angels called Reputation and Budget watching over ) the only factors left are the initial amounts of the various isotopes in the rocks, the amounts there now, and the radioactive half-lives. Half-lives are known, there's no reason to suppose they've altered over time (pace Paco), and using a mathematical technique called the isochron method, you don't even need to know (or assume) how much of anything was there to start with. Far, far fewer variables to worry about than in a criminal investigation!

Dates automatically getting longer and longer the further back one proposes they should be? This is another old canard, and I think it comes from the fact that different radioactive isotopes have very, very different half-lives. Take carbon-14 (half-life 5730 ± 40 years) & rubidium-87 (48 800 000 000 ± (?)200 000 000 years). Suppose you had an object with both of these in. The maths tells us that:

after 6000 years, the amount of carbon-14 would have dropped to just under 50% of its original value, but the amount of rubidium-87 would only be down to 99.9999915% of its original value

after 100 000 years, the amount of carbon-14 would be down to about 0.00056% of its original value, while roughly 99.99986% of the rubidium-87 would still be there

after 4.6 billion years, the chance of there being even a single carbon-14 atom left would be vanishingly small, but there'd still be 93.68% of the rubidium-87 hanging around

So, if I were trying to date a piece of wood I thought might be 3 000 years old, I'd go for carbon-14 dating, because the change in the amount of that isotope would be big enough to measure, while the change in rubidium-87 wouldn't be; and if my assumption was wrong, the results would tell me so. If I thought it was maybe 200 000 years old, I wouldn't choose either of these, 'cos there'd be so little carbon-14 left, but not enough change in the rubidium-87 to get a decent result; and if I had a rock sample that might be hundreds of millions of years old, I'd go for the Rb method. But my initial guess wouldn't determine the outcome in any way; it's just a matter of deciding the most sensible tool to try first.

It's a bit like measuring the distance between my computer and Cobra's glass of iced tea. Shall I use a 12" ruler? Or for the thickness of a fingernail, shall I use the trip counter on my car? Maybe not...

Big margins of error? So a rock is dated with an uncertainty of 4 million years either way. Sounds huge! But not when you consider the date itself was 200 million years. 200 ± 4 m.y. means the age has been found to lie somewhere in the range 196 million to 204 million years. Where's the problem in that?

And finally, the scientific community has a kind of in-built humility, through the habit of rigorously reporting the margin of uncertainty on any measurement, and a method for doing fundamental research which involves testing hypotheses to destruction. What a lot of YE apologists want from science is a false humility in the face of a certain way of interpreting Genesis, that says that scientific results may not, after all, mean what they clearly do mean.

S, I laughed out loud and had to read that response to my wife.
Live long and prosper.

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Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

The problem's not with sharing ideas, Paco — far from it! The problem's with sharing unsupported ideas as if they have parity with carefully argued ones. If you make unsubstantiated claims, then your statements unfortunately belittle themselves.

On the topic of changing-c theories, do the sort of ideas postulated by a few people out there give the size & direction of change in c that would square the YE circle (i.e., as DB mentioned, give the right appearance of age for a universe that's only in fact ~10 000 years old?) And do they include a concurrent change in mass, that would compensate for the E = mc² effect that DB calculated?

You see, unless you are prepared to think them through a bit in these kinds of terms, ideas like this one do (as DB has said) obscure the the debate rather than illuminating it.

I think Spock's right; even in the States, I you'll find there are people who never think seriously about Jesus for precisely this kind of reason. They are often the movers and shakers of society, as well, which should give pause for thought.

P.S. Thanks for the kind comments, Serendipity!

Your analogy only works with things regarded as natural and completely disregards the supernatural (which creation IS and which science CANNOT build in any sort of allowance for because there is no way to calculate or demonstrate what happened).

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Everyone is equal at the foot of the cross...just some are more equal than others.
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Rocks are natural.
Radioactive decay is natural.
Sediment deposits are natural.
Erosion is natural.
One could say nature is so natural that it is the root word for natural.
All these things point to an earth that is much older than 10000 years.

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Cobra (the car, not the poisonous reptile)
all scripture is NRSV unless otherwise noted

Andy,
The 'humility' of the scientific community is not normally public (where they preach as if they know for certain), so if they are humble about their hypotheses than they are that way typically only in private. The scientific community is also rather inbred (as so many of our close-knit communities become) which doesn't always lead to the rigorous standards that you suppose for them, but rather leads to the vast majority being forced to certain conclusions in order to even be permitted to publish or get funding for their work.

Evidence always requires interpretation (I've always affirmed this)...the difference is that in one case we have the entirely human endeavor to interpret rocks and decay and presupposes that they could not have been created with age and/or that the rates of decay have remained constant enough over millions and even billions of years (given how short of a time span we have been measuring for this seems presumptuous) and on the other hand we have a special revelation (through humans and presumably Moses) given by God concerning the age of humanity (Gen.5). You may want to try to fit it, I simply recognize that we don't have all the answers concerning the evidence, but Scripture speaks plainly enough and I don't wish to go beyond what Scripture has said, even in the face of the majority of current scientific thought). While I can agree that it is possible that things receive readings of ages based off of our assumptions and current calculations this does not inherently mean that is the actual date of anything, it simply means that we have a reading that given all the tools we have used to calculate leads us to believe that it is so. Are there other possibilities for interpreting the readings or are they as straightforward as so many wish to portray them? Does the evidence speak for itself, or do we still have to interpret it in light of our own pre-understanding?

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Everyone is equal at the foot of the cross...just some are more equal than others.
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rickwadholmjr.wordpress.com
iheartbarth.wordpress.com
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Twitter: @RickWadholmJr

I agree that one interpretation of the data is that they might point in that direction...

_________________
Everyone is equal at the foot of the cross...just some are more equal than others.
Forum Code of Conduct
Bible.org Doctrinal Statement
rickwadholmjr.wordpress.com
iheartbarth.wordpress.com
bluechippastor.org
Twitter: @RickWadholmJr