The Argument From Design

[popeyespappy]

I did not scream anything, you need to turn down your hearing aid. I did not say I could not prove God, I said that what I would use you would not accept. Now for your flowers they change colors big deal, let's see if you keep cross pollinating them if we will get a tree or maybe a man eating vine, that would be cool. I bet if you do that for 10,000 generations the best you will do is a rainbow colored flower of the same exact species. Maybe you can show me that stuff but it in no way can prove evolution, there is no evidence ie. facts to prove that any one species has turned into another species. As for my pastor you could only hope to be as smart as he is, now for the one thing that stands out in what he has shown me is this, that the most reliable dating we have shows that the earth is about 50,000 years old. I have no problem with that but you should, because that puts an end to the number of years it would take for evolutionary processes to work. Carbon 14 dating is highly unreliable because you can not know the amount of carbon present during the time of the dinosaur, not even 100,000 years ago, so you have no test samples to go by, we know that carbon does not stay at a consistant level.

Poor child, I’m afraid you’ve completely missed the point on the little botany experiment. The most likely reason for your oversight is because your very intelligent nuclear engineer preacher is teaching you how not to use your critical thinking skills. So let me help you out here. The point of the little experiment in gardening was not to prove to you that dogs give birth to cats, because they don’t, but rather so you could demonstrate to yourself that changes in the frequency of alleles within a population over time is a fact. Like it or not, these changes over time are evidence of evolution.

Now, if your little rant about carbon-14 radiometric dating is an example of the type of knowledge your very intelligent nuclear engineer preacher is passing to you then I’m afraid he’s not very intelligent at all. To begin with, cardon-14 isn’t used to date dinosaurs. Carbon-14 dating doesn’t work for objects older than 60 to 70 thousand years so other methods are used beyond that range. And yes, scientists are aware that levels of atmospheric Carbon-14 have fluctuated over time. Fortunately they are able to calibrate their results for those changes. The latest calibration curve is called INTCAL09 if you’d care to look into it. Results calibrated using INTCAL09 give an accurate date range for objects up to 50,000 years.

There are numerous other methods of radiometric dating available for really old objects. These methods include uranium-lead, Samarium-neodymium, Potassium-argon and several others. Regardless of what your preacher tells you these are the most reliable methods for dating old objects. They work accurately for objects that are billions of years old and have been used to date terrestrial rocks that are 3 to 4 billion years old. Some examples of those samples have been dated using more than one method of radiometric dating with the same result.

Unfortunately the oldest rocks discovered to date on Earth are less than 4 billion years old. This is due to the fact that most of the Earth’s crust has been recycled via tectonic activity since then. The best estimate for the age of the Earth comes not from terrestrial material but from meteorites found here on Earth. These meteorites coalesced at the same time and from the same accretion disk as the Earth and the rest of the planets. They have been dated at 4.54 billion years old using the Uranium-lead method.

BTW, I couldn’t help but notice that you failed to address the part about ERV’s. I can only assume that’s because you don’t understand it so I drew you a picture. Hope it helps.