How do you know God isn't dead?

[pocaracas]

These replies are getting too big again... time for a TLDR, no?

---

Because they're outliers.
Only some rocks have this problem. Not most... some... a few. Not statistically relevant.

Accept when they try to date rocks of known age, all of the sudden the outliers become the norm.

But, on this particular location, the layers are not stacked up vertically, but rather horizontally. Care to guess why that is?

I’d have to see what you are referring to, I’d assume through some sort of upheaval. Near where I live you can see large bent but unbroken bands of strata, how are they unbroken if they were each deposited separately and solidified over millions of years but were then bent by seismic forces later? It looks to me like they were bent while they were still soft and solidified afterwards.

Yep, it's something like that.
And you miss the option where this bending was done over a long time and that is why it's not broken.
You usually have volcanic rock and sedimentary rock mingled in those bands... You don't think they were all molten or soft at the same time, do you?

jWhere am I going with this? To the fact that OF COURSE a book that was written without proper verification of facts is never taken into account when researching something in a scientific way. And if that research leads to a conclusion that clashes with whatever is in the book, then science doesn't care.... the book is wrong! Harry potter is wrong, there's no magic; Dracula is wrong, there are no vampires; Star Trek is wrong, there was no Eugenics war in the late 20th century; etc...etc...etc...

None of those books claim to be infallible, so comparing them to scripture is fallacious. When a source that claims to be infallible disagrees with what we already know is fallible (science) we have to go about things far differently.

Oh.... all it takes is a claim of infallibility?
Well, I claim all I ever wrote on this forum to be infallible... except where I forgot some details (That wasn't me posting.. it was my alter-ego).
There.

Short lived isotopes are isotopes with a short half-life, like carbon-14. Which oppose long lived isotopes like Uranium-234.

Yes I am well aware of what they are, but some short-lived isotopes are merely theorized to have naturally existed even though we have never observed them to have existed in nature, so it was unclear which you were referring to.

Sorry about being unclear... In my mind, it was very clear...
Curse this limited language thing.

The flood of water, you mean?! BUHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Yes, water is the number one cause of contamination within supposed closed systems; I am shocked you were unaware of that.

Water contaminates radioisotopes causing them to show a more advanced decay than they should?

Care to present a viable mechanism for this?

No, radiometric dating has been consistent and yields results compatible with independent dating methodologies. I have no reason to doubt it.

Except for when it contradicts independent dating methodologies such as the lunar recession rate right? So it’s always consistent except for the numerous times when it’s not.

There you go with that moon thing again.
let's give you a bit more science then: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22...akeup.html

---

---

"It's just a model"... but it shows a possible way of having everything at the correct radiometric timing... You see, we like consistency.
Oh, notice the conservation of angular momentum of the Earth-moon system... as the moon comes closer, the Earth rotates faster, as well as the moon, thus "decelerating" the moon as it comes closer to the Earth (with time moving backwards).

Your simplistic creationist literature model seems to be missing an element... although I grant it's easy to miss... even I missed it! And everything I post is infallible, remember?

All it says is that the Earth and moon were formed roughly 4.5 billion years ago.

But according to the Laws of Physics that’s not possible, so either the Laws of Physics are wrong or radiometric dating is, I’ll side with the Laws of Physics on this one.

Which laws of physics make that impossible?...

It's possible... of course... but to claim that those conditions happened practically homogeneously throughout the Earth seems a stretch...
Are any of those conditions a flood?!

No, they most likely occurred during the formation of the Earth during creation week leading to billions of years’ worth of decay (at today’s rates) within a matter of hours. Observable Helium retention rates support this hypothesis.

With each reply, a new "creationist scientific fact" appears...
When I google "helium retention rates", all I get are creationist websites... And the first one shows exactly how unbiased this study was [/sarcasm]

Dr. Humphreys, a physicist at the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Dr. John Baumgardner, a geophysicist currently working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, along with Dr. Steven Austin and Dr. Andrew Snelling, both geologists at ICR, are all members of a collective effort known as the Radioisotopes and the Age of The Earth (RATE) group [see Vardiman, 1999]. The RATE project is a collaborative venture composed of professional scientists primarily from ICR and the Creation Research Society.

Somehow, these people managed to publish on a real geology journal: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2003AGUFM.V32C1047H

And then there is one worthy exception in the google list of results: http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/showth...-quot-list


Oh, but I don't even need to find the rebuttal in non-creationist sites... http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/helium/original.html

It was that faulty K-Ar method with excessive 40Ar that yielded such results.

Yup, even though you previously stated all of the methods yield consistent results we now appear to have a faulty method. The reason they claim there is excess argon is because they missed the targeted age so badly, it’s an Ad Hoc Hypothesis in order to save their method. The problem is that without a known target, there is no way to determine if excesses exist or not. The method is now useless. Thanks for providing the article by the way.

What I say may be infallible, but not the science I point at
Science keeps evolving... if one method is found to have some downsides, then its scope becomes reduced.

As you may have noticed in that Helium retention fiasco, each rock can be dated by more than one radioisotope... if one fails, then scientists try to find out why. They discover that, under some conditions the K-Ar method is not reliable... and promptly came up with another more reliable method.

Fair enough. Found that study Analysis of Dinosaur Bone Cells Confirms Ancient Protein Preservation. It only proves they found proteins which are found in DNA, but it's a step in the right direction...

No in 2012 they actually found in tact DNA (greater than 170 base pairs), the problem was that nobody had ever tried looking for it because they knew such matter could not last that long and they knew the bones were that old. It’s just another example of how the power of the evolutionary paradigm actually hampers our scientific discoveries.

No.... they don't expect soft tissue because the fossilization mechanism has been well described... and nothing soft is expected to remain... however, it's clear that models can be thwarted by nature and it's quirks and details that elude the model.

“The data thus far seem to support the theory that these structures can be preserved over time,” Schweitzer says. “Hopefully these findings will give us greater insight into the processes of evolutionary change.”

Mary’s still got to get published, she can’t rock the boat too much. We know DNA cannot last that long, all of the empirical studies measuring its rates of decay demonstrate that.

Perhaps there are some special conditions in which those strands of DNA can last that long.... like your helium

The scientists studying this don't jump the gun and state young Earth... instead, they state proteins can withstand for longer than we thought... let's try to discover what conditions lead to such marvelously long preservation.

Yes, even though if you had claimed in the 1980s (as creationists did) that it was feasible to find dinosaur DNA you would have been laughed out of the room. People know what the proper implications of this finding are; they just want to keep their jobs.

Science is not based of unsubstantiated claims.
In the early 20th century, Einstein frowned at Quantum Mechanics...
And then he used it to calculate nuclear decays and cross sections...

(wait, are you accepting that the Earth and Sun are that old?):

Nope, the faint young-sun paradox is only a problem for those that believe the Sun is that old, not for the Creation model.

I missed the part where it's a problem...

Underwater.Volcanic.Vents.
They provide all the heat required to melt water locally, soup like "nutrients", etc... Kind of like what's suspected to happen in Europa.

Yes, but now you have a different problem, in all of the laboratory experiments seeking to demonstrate amino acids can be formed from early earth environments the catalyst (heat) has to be quickly removed in order to prevent it from destroying the newly created amino acids, but in deep sea vents that are keeping the water at liquid form this could not happen and the heat from the vents would destroy the newly formed amino acid chains and thus no life.

Errr.... you are aware of thermal gradients... At the vent it may be too hot... but a bit further out.... just enough to keep the water from freezing... let's say, above zero degrees Centigrade.

Perhaps you don't know what "independent" means.
A completely different method of dating. Not at all related to radiometric. That's why the link I posted "has nothing to do with radiometric dating". It's about neutrino rate dating of the sun... Something you don't find in your creationist books, I assume... or you'd have some snarky comeback.

That’s what you were trying to do? You think the fact that they believe the Sun is 5 billion years old supports the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old? That seems to be quite a non-sequitur, even if the Sun were that old it does not support the idea that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old.

non-sequitur is accepting that the sun is 5 billion years old, but the Earth and the remaining Universe were created a few thousands of years ago... -.-'

If the sun is 5 billion years old, then the Earth and all planets in the solar system must be less than that. And what do you know?... they are!

---

TLDR: creationist "science" keeps failing to sustain itself, while real science acknowledges its limitations and advances...