How do you know God isn't dead?

[Statler Waldorf]

Would you care to elaborate on why you feel this to be a valid objection?

Of course it’s a valid objection, if you’re assumptions are not verifiable and are faulty there’s no reason to hold confidence in the accuracy of the method that depends upon the merits of these assumptions.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Are you saying that just assumptions should be verifiable? If so, how might one confirm an assumption?

[The Grand Nudger]

Another long post in which you have completely failed to understand the concept of a selectively neutral mutation - having a conversation in your head with some less informed person you are capable of arguing with- and added "nu-uhs" when confronted with observations that leave you no room to wiggle.

Pointless Stat. I probably would have responded in kind except that there's nothing in your recent post that hasn't already been answered in the previous posts.

[Statler Waldorf]

Are you saying that just assumptions should be verifiable? If so, how might one confirm an assumption?

Now this is ironic, the self-proclaimed verificationist is now defending the merits of a dating method that is founded upon unverifiable assumptions. Whether an assumption is verifiable or not is largely dependent upon what sort of assumption we are dealing with. Basing your entire view of the history of the Earth on methods that are founded upon unverifiable assumptions and assumptions that appear to be downright false is not rational.

---

Another long post in which you have completely failed to understand the concept of a selectively neutral mutation - having a conversation in your head with some less informed person you are capable of arguing with- and added "nu-uhs" when confronted with observations that leave you no room to wiggle.

There are not enough trials in order to fix neutral mutations in a population through genetic drift, argue for the impossible all you want but it doesn’t make it anymore possible. Trust me Rhythm, my mental concept of your knowledge definitely errors on the side of you knowing more than you do in reality; I am a rather gracious person when it comes to that sort of thing.

Pointless Stat. I probably would have responded in kind except that there's nothing in your recent post that hasn't already been answered in the previous posts.

This excuse carries the foul stench of all being rather too convenient for you.

[little_monkey]

How do you know God isn't dead?

Yep, it's hard to kill a fictional character.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are not enough trials in order to fix neutral mutations in a population through genetic drift, argue for the impossible all you want but it doesn’t make it anymore possible.

Again you fail to comprehend selective neutrality. For something to be selectively neutral - any conception of a "trial" loses all meaning. A selectively neutral mutation is happenstance Stat, nothing more and nothing less. Nothing acts upon it because there is no way for any action to be directed at it or at it's behest. It's not an issue of possibility, no ones arguing that selectively neutral mutations are possible - I'm simply explaining to you - very blunty, that they exist. If this were the only concept which you failed to comprehend - it would be difficult to see how you could understand evolutionary theory at all - this single omission colors every response in your posts. You need to get that handled man.

Trust me Rhythm, my mental concept of your knowledge definitely errors on the side of you knowing more than you do in reality; I am a rather gracious person when it comes to that sort of thing.

Clearly not, because you're running an AIG playbook here and it's fucking insulting.

This excuse carries the foul stench of all being rather too convenient for you.

You've got me dead to rights. It -is- very convenient for me. You see, I have other things to do. I took time out of my day to help you t understand this thing you feel compelled to argue against - at the very least, if you incorporated an accurate appraisal of evolutionary biology you would be a more competent dissenter. You seem to be entirely uninterested, and in kind, I've become uninterested.

If you have some specific gripe that you can clearly and succinctly articulate, I probably wont be able top help myself. But the vast and, in my opinion, -intentional- misrepresentations thusfar are just too much of a pain in the ass for me to address bud.

[Colanth]

you're running an AIG playbook here and it's fucking insulting.

Creationism usually is, isn't it?

[The Grand Nudger]

Nah, there's more than one kind. It's a bit amusing in that regard - like having clubs for people who like separate flavors of ice-cream that don't exist.

[The Reality Salesman01]

Now this is ironic, the self-proclaimed verificationist is now defending the merits of a dating method that is founded upon unverifiable assumptions. Whether an assumption is verifiable or not is largely dependent upon what sort of assumption we are dealing with. Basing your entire view of the history of the Earth on methods that are founded upon unverifiable assumptions and assumptions that appear to be downright false is not rational.

I'm not defending anything. I just asked you a question. You anticipating my stance toward anything outside the subject matter of my question is an assumption, and my opinion of it hasn't been stated. I asked YOU if assumptions are all that should be verifiable, and if so, I asked YOU, how an assumption could be confirmed. You did not answer either of these questions. Is there a reason why?

[pocaracas]

That took a while...

Damn, man... I need to copy this over to notepad++ so I can make sense of it!
Hiding it all, so the forum remains a bit clean...

---

So you think that a radiometric dating system is faulty at its core?

Yes, it relies upon unverifiable and apparently faulty assumptions.

Which assumptions?

An alternative method for dating rock is using plate tectonics and the measurable rate at which continents are drifting apart... of course, assuming they've been drifting at a constant pace (will you claim that they drifted much much faster at the start so to make it seem as if they took millions of years to drift at a constant velocity?).
Plate tectonics also helps to account for the finding of similar fossils in continents now separated by oceans... and they have all been radiometrically dated in such a way that is consistent with constant tectonic drift.

Yes, catastrophic plate tectonics is part of the modern Creation model, so their current rates cannot be a valid method of dating. How are they radio-metrically dating fossils? I didn’t think that was possible.

I thought I had told you already... Fossils are dated from the boundaries provided by rocks above and below the layers at which the fossils are found.
Fossil dating always comes with an error bar.

"inference"... yes, you keep changing the name of it to convince yourself that others do assumptions and you don't... -.-'

You lost me there; whenever we are dealing with historical sciences we must make an inference to the best possible explanation.

Sorry, as far as I can see, a creator cannot be inferred.
It can only be assumed.

ok, I admit I kind of doubted my sanity a bit with that one...
But your model does not account for ice ages, where all the water is locked and that mechanism doesn't exist, thus bringing the moon a bit closer.
Now, how many ice ages has the planet seen? How often?

But radiometric methods yield the same age for the moon and Earth. Consistency is good.

Ice Ages may have slowed the recession down a bit, but nobody believes the Ice Ages were really that long and nobody believes they removed all Oceanic tides from the Earth.

Indeed they mustn't... but they may have been enough to prevent the feedback mechanism which is currently causing the moon to drift away.

Not only this, but I was being rather generous (in the interest of Christian charity ) by allowing the Moon to actually touch the Earth, the actual limit is a lot farther out than that because once the Moon enters the Earth’s Roche Limit it could not have been formed in the first place, so this is still a huge problem for the current Earth timeline and radio-metric dating as a valid method as well.

So... two proto-planets colliding is just complete non-sense... obviously!
[/irony]

Methinks your method has some shortcomings that need addressing.

Me thinks yours does

It seems both have their shortcomings.
Maybe reality lies somewhere else.

QM tells us the rate of fusion reactions.
Mass spectrometry tells us how much of each element the Sun has.
Plug one into the other and voila. I don't see assumptions.

You’re assuming the rates observed today were uniform throughout Earth’s history, that’s an assumption.

I'm assuming atoms are the same today as they have been throughout the history of the planet, yes.
Protons and neutron and electrons can't be different now from ehat they were back then... can they?

And radioactive decay is quite accurate.... also coming from QM.

Then why can’t it ever accurately date rocks of known age?

Can't they now?
All of science has error bars. If you have no error bars on your plot, you're doing it wrong.

What 2 way!?
Only one way required for spectrometry.... -.-'

No, you’re still assuming that light traveling towards Earth from distant galaxies is moving at C; that is not verifiable because all we can empirically measure is the round trip speed of light.

And now you're claiming light propagates differently in different parts of empty space?

So far, you've claimed that Quantum Mechanics is wrong and astrophysics.. not to mention electro-magnetics.... what's next? thermodynamics?

I don't know.
Are you going to tell me I should accept some storytelling book written in the neolithic?

When a book was written is irrelevant in regards to the truth of its claims. So you do not know how life formed but you have faith that it was by naturalistic means?

That's not it...
I have no reason to think that it came about by any means other than naturalistic.

At least they are consistent among themselves.

If none of them are verifiable then consistency doesn’t mean anything, I had plenty of students who would consistently get the same wrong answer to a particular math problem.

Aye, it's a possibility.
But carbon dating is accurate... do tell me it isn't... -.-'
Other methods' lower bounds match quite well with it... and since they are based on the same principle of radioactive decay, then any extrapolation has a good chance of being right.

And (at least) two consistent independent measurements of the same thing, sure hint at an accurate measurement by both.

Not if both methods are banking off of the same erroneous assumption.

Do you have any evidence that the assumptions are erroneous?
You keep spitting in the face of QM, electromagnetism, astrophysics.... why? To try to save the face of your book written by ignorant people?

Carbon dating IS radiometric dating...

True enough, but I meant when radiocarbon dating conflicts with the radiometric dating of igneous rocks, which one is right in those situations?

What?! Why are trying to use carbon dating on rocks? Rocks don't usually have carbon... unless some biological entity died among them.
And carbon dating can only go as far back as... 60,000 years... and that's stretching it! After all, C-14 has a half-life of 5730 years.
Rocks are dated using uranium isotopes with a half-life of 80,000 years, or Rubidium with a half-life of 50 billion years, or Potassium with a half-life of 1.3 billion years.
There are many other methods and many other isotopes... these are just the most common.
They work quite well... agree quite well with each other... and steadily provide reliable measurements for scientists to date their rocks, cloths, pottery, bones, etc...

Here, read about those "soft tissues": http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...osaur.html

Yup, I have read that article before, but soft tissue and DNA being found in dinosaur fossils is not evidence organic matter can last that long, it’s evidence those fossils are not that old. Every study conducted concerning the empirical decay rates of such organic matter demonstrates that it is absurd to think they could survive for 65 million years.

Clearly, you didn't read it.
[sensei]Again!

Oh, a new insight into creation... not all at the same time... Where did you get this info?

It’s available in numerous creation books and articles, the current model is that God created the different kinds of animals, but a Biblical kind is more along the lines of a family or genus, the different species we observe are the result of natural selection acting upon the genetic information present in the original created kind.

Why don't they teach this in sunday school?
Ah, it must be because I'm in a catholic country.... around here, the teaching goes along the lines of:

---

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. 12 The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. 13 And there was evening, and there was morning—the third day.

14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, 15 and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. 16 God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. 17 God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good. 19 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fourth day.

20 And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” 21 So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 22 God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” 23 And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.

24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals,[a] and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

---

Yeah... first, plants, then light, then birds and fish... then land animals.
I don't know... this version must be screwed up. They call it NIV.
[/sarcasm]

Look at the evolutionary idea: apes evolve in the safety of trees, as it becomes safer to walk the land, they descend and get nimble at walking up straight, because, at that particular geographic location, there are very few, if any, predators.
Story-telling at it's finest.... dinos and humans...

Dinosaurs coexisting with Humans isn’t any more storytelling than Dinosaurs evolving into birds or Ancient Apes evolving into Modern Humans.

Oh but it is, because the dating of the dino fossils doesn't match with the dating of the human/ape fossils.
Different stratigraphic layers... that's another way to tell if a pile of bones is older than another pile of bones.

I'm not aware of any cases where it happens in other species, so there... I don't know.

Weren’t you just telling a story about bacteria gaining an extra chromosome or something of that nature?

It was a hypothetical case... based on the knowledge that it can happen with humans.

Interesting paper...
Didn't read the whole thing, but I did read some particular bits:
- mutations arise primarily from the father zygote, given that the father produces millions of sperm per day, the odds of some error are greater than on the mother's side, who produced all the zygotes before birth... this checks out with something I read recently that stated that there are more autistic kids from older fathers than from younger ones. IF you're over 35, you have a higher tendency to produce an autistic child than if you're 20.
- Deleterious mutations are removed from the population in about 80 generations.
- On the other hand, there's this gem "In [...] people, recessive mutations may persist for thousands of generations. "

That’s just the paper that I got the 3-5 percent rate from; the implications of that rate and what they mean for the history of man are better explained by Sanford in his book, “Genetic Entropy and the Mystery of the Genome.” It’s an excellent book and has really turned some heads in the geneticist community.

Oh yeah... some heads...
Remember that 600 year figure I mentioned earlier... keep it in mind and think...
600 years ago, 50% of our genome was different (if we go by that guy's notion)... What's that species that has only 2% of its DNA different from humans?
yeah... I don't think European kings from the dark ages were all that different from us, biologically speaking. Of course, all deleterious mutations are weeded out of the population... it says so in the paper! But it's promptly ignored by that book's author... -.-'

I have logical reasons to assume any scripture is man-made and, as such, fallible.
I have logical reasons to give credence to the theory of evolution, in spite of it being fallible.

Care to share your reasons?

scripture is man-made: reasoning behind it => it's a story written by people. There, man-made!
Give credence to evolution: reasoning behind it => fossil record, DNA, Observed speciation...

Both can be viewed as storytelling, but one is based on actual empirical (since you like that word) findings... the other, on myth.

I totally agree! Creation is the former and Evolution is the latter right?

Try the opposite!

The mechanism which generated life still eludes science, so any such mechanism you do hear about is storytelling, hypothesizing.
Which hypothesis is correct... we'll see when we see. Until then, the best course of action is not assume anything.

What if we have direct revelation from the creator of life? Why do you discount that and wait for a naturalistic explanation that apparently does not exist?

Do we have that now?
How can you be sure that it is what people claim it to be, instead of some made-up crap?
Why do you accept the christian made-up myth instead of the Egyptian made-up myth, or the Celt made-up myth, or the Hindu made-up myth, or any other myth that man has thought of?

I discount that because of a few things:
1. There are people nowadays with psychological disorders which present symptoms very similar to the ones people related concerning the people who claimed direct contact with that creator.
2. The creator hasn't stepped forward for any scientific scrutiny. It would do it no harm to do so, and yet.... nothing.
3. Any creator story stems from a very restricted geographical location, a very precise temporal location... and very small population subset.
All these combined scream out: man-made!
They're not proof, of course, but they're very good hints.... IMHO.

Concerning the evolution of dinosaurs int o birds... it took quite a lot of time for that to happen and it is based on feather-like imprints found in some fossils, so there's some reason to that.

That’s quite the extrapolation don’t you think?

What? That we find clear dinosaur fossils with feather-like imprints?

---

Those must be hoaxes, right?

---

Turning helium into other (heavier) elements is something known as Nuclear Fusion, which opposes nuclear fission, whereby the nucleus would be torn apart resulting in lighter elements.
I believe you've heard of nuclear power plants, no?... they operate on the fission principle.
You've heard of Little Boy? That one used fusion, of hydrogen into helium... that's why it was called a hydrogen bomb.
Nuclear fusion and fission are real processes that affect our daily lives, one way or another. They are not myths.

I am well aware that Stellar Fusion is not a myth. However, I am also well aware that we’ve never observed Stellar Fusion producing anything other than Helium and the very rare case of Lithium, so that cannot be used to explain the origins of all of the other natural occurring elements. The current theory is that other elements were formed by Population III starts entering the Super Nova stage of a star’s life, the only problem with this theory is that to date no Population III stars have even been observed to exist.

Yes.... individual stars are hard to spot, unless they're in the vicinity, aka, our galaxy.
Those PopIII stars would have been the very first ones, the ones from long ago, and we'd only be able to spot them in far far far away galaxies... But spotting an individual star in a galaxy... difficult thing, I'd say.

I pity your logic that dismisses reality in favor of a story written some 2 thousand years ago by people who knew no better.

Reality? You mean theories that rely upon the existence of stars that have never been observed to exist? You keep bringing up the age of the Bible, I hope you are aware that is irrelevant to whether it is true or not.

It is relevant in that it tells you something about the people who wrote it. Their knowledge of the Universe, their ability to perceive the real.

hehe, when I decide to ignore what you write, I'll say something like: "That was utter BS which warrants no reply whatsoever. Lay off the kool aid."

That doesn’t seem to be your style.

Nah.... but I'm getting there! Just look at all the sarcasm I had to put in this post... patience wears thin.

---

TLDR version: The creationist is at it again. Science presents several independent methods for dating a rock. Where the methods' domains overlap, they have quite good agreement, thus increasing our confidence on each of the methods. However, the creationist dismisses them due to some assumption that has to be made in all of them, and in all of them the assumption has to be wrong, because it contradicts the creationist's book. Independent erroneous assumptions about completely different physical principles, yielding the same results, is the same as saying that the laws of physics must have been different in the past. So I hear the creationist saying that the Universe has been changing its laws in such a way that science cannot grasp... in such a way as to make science consistently arrive at the wrong results... all this, because a specific people a few thousands of years ago MUST, obviously, have gotten word from the creator itself, and wrote a book where they detailed the whole account.
Thus the creationist dismisses consistent independently corroborated assumptions, while retaining the fully unsupported assumption that those people wrote reality.
Talk about intellectual dishonesty!