Young Earth Creationism Vs. Science (Statler Waldorf Contd)

[Statler Waldorf]

Yeah, I figured you were going to come back with this bullshit.

Way to twist around my meaning.

I never said or implied that scientific facts are determined by the majority. However, when 99.5% of scientists agree on something (such as the age of the Earth) and they can support their contention with solid evidence, I'm inclined to believe their conclusion. In contrast, when a very small minority wants to claim that the 99.5% are off by a factor of over 400,000, and they have no evidence to support this notion,

You keep doing the very thing you are claiming to know not to do. I will say it again, scientific fact has never been and never will be based on consensus. It doesn’t amount to a hill of beans what any percentage of the scientists believe and don’t believe. You’d be the guy in the early 20th century saying, “General relativity is a load of crap because only one crank named Albert believes in it and the vast majority of scientists don’t!”
The majority of scientists have been wrong time and time again. Then you go on to say that the evidence says the earth is 4.5 billion years old. Evidence doesn’t “say” anything. One interpretation of some of the evidence says the earth is that old. However, another interpretation of the evidence says it is very very young.

This would be like scientists measuring the distance from NY to LA and concluding it's 3,000 miles. Then people like you come along and want to insist that the measuring instruments are unreliable, and the actual distance from NY to LA is only 35 FEET!

It is not like saying that. Measuring the distance from NY to LA is done by direct observation. You cannot directly observe the age of the earth. Horrible analogy. Rather it would be like one group saying, “Todd grew one inch this year, he is 72 inches tall, therefore he must be 72 years old.”
While a second group says, “No no, we believe that Todd has not grown at a constant rate for his entire life, and probably was not born zero inches tall, therefore we feel Todd is way younger than 72 years.” Of course you’d laugh at this second group and call them a bunch of cranks, but you’d be just as wrong as you are now.

Yeah, sign me up for your camp.

Sweet! Will do. Obviously you need to learn a thing or two about the difference between operational sciences and historical sciences and a thing or two about the nature of evidence.

Really? Dozens, huh? Since you have "dozens", give me two dozen.

Sure! I’ll give you the ones we have already discussed first…

1. Soft tissue in dinosaur fossils
2. C14 in coal and diamonds.
3. Observed genetic entropy rates in the human genome indicate it can only be a few thousand years old.
4. Very small variation in Y chromosome differences around the world indicates mans origin was only a few thousand years ago.
5. Racemization of amino acids not reaching 50/50 in bones that are supposedly millions of years old. 50/50 racemization occurs in only a few thousand years.
6. Large amounts of strata are tightly bent but unbroken, indicating they were laid down in short periods of time like we observed with Mt. St. Helens, rather than millions of years.
7. Polystratic fossils. Fossilized trees spanning layers of strata that are supposedly millions of years old, yet there is not more decay in the areas of the tree that would have remained unburied for all that time indicating the trees were buried quickly not slowly.
8. Labs mimicking natural conditions have shown that black coal can naturally form in months, not millions of years like previously thought. (same thing is observed with oil.)
9. Complete lack of bioturbation in layers of strata that are supposedly millions of years old.
10. Observed formation of canyons in very short periods of time suggests that canyons we didn’t observe form but believe to be very old could be very young.
11. Horizontal and vertical erosion on coast lines happens far to quickly for the continents to be very old.
12. Discordant drainage systems found worldwide do not fit the deep time model.
13. Observed erosion rates at Niagara Falls match a time scale of a few thousand years, not its assumed age of millions of years.
14. Even ignoring the affects of a biblical flood, observed saline net input rates into the oceans indicate they are 1/50 the age the old earth crowd believes they are.
15. Also, even ignoring the affects of a global flood, the accumulation rates of sediments on the ocean floors indicates they are very young.
16. Iron-manganese nodules on the sea floor form at a rate that indicates they are only a few thousand years old. Not millions like previously believed.
17. Exponential decay in the Earth’s magnetic field indicates it is far younger than even 20,000 years.
18. The amounts of helium in zircon crystals indicate only 6000 years of radioactive decay has actually occurred.
19. Evidence of recent volcanic activity on the earth’s moon indicates it is far younger than it’s assume age of over a billion years.
20. The moon receding from the earth due to tidal friction indicates that the two would have been touching long before their assumed ages. (Note, this recession rate is slowing down, not speeding up).
21. The fact that the planet mercury has a very significant magnetic field indicates it cannot be its assumed age of billions of years, but rather much younger.
22. The faint young sun paradox.
23. No observed method for comet creation, despite their observed decay rates would mean they could only last for 10,000 years max.
24. 0.5 % p.a. growth for humans (far smaller than today’s rate) from six people 4,500 years ago would yield today’s population.
25. I’ll even spot you one in the spirit of Christian charity lol… lack of nearly enough “stone age” skeletons and artifacts for the assumed ages of human history.


Well that was easy!

No, it's not a non-sequitor. My point is that there is just as much support for a flat Earth in the scientific community as there is for a young Earth.

Back to not understanding what establishes a scientific fact and how evidence works again I see.

I see... so you want to use C-14 for your purposes even though you say "it was not calibrated correctly". Ya got a source to back up that statement, by the way?

“The amount of 14C produced in the atmosphere varies with the sun’s solar activity and fluctuations in Earth’s magnetic field. This means that the radiocarbon clock can race ahead or seemingly stop for up to 5 centuries. As a result, raw radiocarbon dates sometimes diverge from real calendar years by hundreds or even thousands of years. Thus researchers must calibrate the clock to account for these fluctuations, and that can be a challenge.”

- “Radiocarbon Dating’s Final Frontier”, Science Vol. 313.

That’s even ignoring the initial erroneous assumptions (atmospheric equilibrium and Egyptian chronology) the method was calibrated with. It could be off by many thousands of years very easily.

Can you provide a scientific source that reached this conclusion? Because I'll bet you can't.

Only because you define “scientific source” as one that believes the earth is 4.5 billion years old, which of course is a logical fallacy.

And how can you be confident "the maximum" is valid when you said that it's "not calibrated correctly"?

Because the calibration has to do with the ratios not with the observed decay rates.

Try this analogy:

An autograph of Abraham Lincoln surfaces. Experts examine it and declare that the paper it is written on wasn't manufactured until 1920.

Would you now consider the autograph to be a forgery? Or would you think this is proof that Abraham Lincoln was alive in 1920?

Not proof that Abraham lived in 1920 considering his death was observed to happen long before that. Nobody has observed the earth to be 4.5 billion years old so this analogy fails.

Wrong. My reasoning is based upon logic, not observation. No matter how you want to twist it to match your argument.

That explains a lot considering science is based on both logic and observation. Hide in a dark box where your senses cannot pick up anything and see how much knowledge about the physical world you gain in there haha.

Isn't the fact that DNA is information that rose by natural means, enough proof that information can rise by natural means?

Saying DNA arose by natural means is evidence that DNA can arise by natural means is circular reasoning. We have never observed any information to arise by natural means, so to say DNA can is a matter of blind faith, not scientific.

Art would be "This is artificial so a intelligent being must have done it" while DNA is "This is Natural so nature must've built it", and art is subjective while dna is objective, also the argument of complexity has been rebuked quite perfectly by the [url=http://www.stonemakerargument.com/1.html]Stonemaker Argument

More circular reasoning, if at first you do not know people created the art then how do you know it is artificial? So you can’t use the fact it is artificial to say you know people created it because we only call things artificial because we know people created them. Rather you would say, “This piece of art contains information, therefore it arose from a mental source.”

So archaeology and anthropology would be destroyed by the existence of another sapient lifeforms, there's a clear distinction between the artificial and the natural, Nature never gave us the Why's it always gave us the How's

It would destroy the two because you could never distinguish between the man-made and the natural. Nature does not always give us the “hows”, it doesn’t tell us how cars were built, or houses, or computers.

Don't remember it was a documentary that gone a long time ago

So you only know they are that old because a TV show told you they were that old?

The real question is why you can't accept evolutionary theory as THE best explanation of 100's of thousands facts evidenced from a very wide range of disciplines. You have provided NO EVIDENCE for creationism at all:

Dodged my question, nice. I can’t accept evolutionary theory because I realize that scientific fact is not established by consensus and information theory has demonstrated that common descent is impossible.

- Coelocanths in the present day do not evidence animals being magic'd into existence and are even consistent with evolution

Actually they are not consistent with evolution; evolutionists thought that finding one was impossible until we found one. It would be impossible for one animal like the Coelacanth to not change any in millions of years while all the other animals around it experienced the same selective pressures and all went extinct or change drastically. It’s a fairy tale.

- C14 in coal is an unexplained phenomona under research. What is in no doubt is that these sediments take a long time to petrify and attest to the fossilised remains of plants no longer seen on the earth. Plants that have never been seen in the relatively recent past (000's of thouands of years) with quaternary deposits of pollens and seeds. Even if true, which I remain skeptical of, it does not evidence a being issuing an incantaion to spontaneously create plant life.

So finding Coelacanths today is evidence for evolution, but not finding certain plant life today is evidence for evolution? Now that is having your cake and eating it too. Actually many plants we see today such as maple trees and oak trees are found in pre-historic layers of strata, let me guess, this is evidence for evolution too? Lol.

C14 in coal and diamonds is evidence these materials are very young which is evidence that confirms the biblical account of creation.

- Soft tissues within dinosaur bones are evidence of the extreme and variable conditions in which petrification occurs. So how does this prove that a large immaterial hand descnded through the clouds and zapped them into existence.

Again, they demonstrate that the dinosaurs died off within a few thousand years, which confirms the biblical account of creation.

I don't apply 'my world view' to these facts to deny YEC, I just apply a skeptical mind and do not OVER-ATTRIBUTE relatively peripheral findings against a mountain of facts which are best explained by ToE...and still are.

Being skeptical of evidence for creation is obviously part of your worldview, so you are applying your worldview.

To convince me you need to state the model under which the YEC would form a coherent theory. Then explain why that better explains the facts. Then provide a mechanism by which we can test its efficacy. That would be the scientific method. You are a scientist aren't you?
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Pretty simple model, Creation occurred around 6000 years ago. A global flood occurred around 4,500 years ago. This model is completely confirmed by the evidence. You just won’t accept it because you interpret the evidence using a worldview that already assumes this model is false.

You are creating a straw man. You are not arguing supernatural against natural, you are arguing evolution against YEC. You have restated the terms of the debate to suit your argument. Evolution is the best natural explaination, but it isn't necessarily the only natural explanation. As for supernaturalism, there are a very large number (almost finite) of possible theories one of which is YEC. It is a bifurcation and disproving evolution does not demonstrate that YEC nor Yahweh did it. Or are you going to argue that if evolution was found to be false tomorrow, that Yahweh or YEC or whatever is stronger explanation than Lord Vishnu, Woden or even extra-terrestial causes?

Evolution is not the only natural explanation huh? That’s funny, both Darwin and Dawkins say it is. YEC is the only supernatural explanation that has been held by recent scientists (Newton, Bacon, and Kepler), so it is the best supernatural explanation. Even Darwin believed it was the only viable supernatural explanation because he used disjunctive reasoning to argue against it. Once you admit that supernatural creation had to occur we can discuss why is has to be the God of the Bible and not Woden. Your argument is illogical though, it would be like saying, “well it appears the answer has to be an even number, but I don’t know which one it has to be so I am going to pick an odd number!”.

What evidence would you accept for evolution?

Easy, show me that mutations that actually increase the information in the genome not only happen but happen more than mutations that reduce information. Next show how DNA could synthesize naturally since this is part of the General Theory of Evolution. Also show me the millions of transitional fossils we should find if evolution occurred. Also show me how your theory could be falsified. Get there and we may be looking at a plausible theory, you are not even close to there with the theory though.

In addition you assert that people like myself hold our views becuase of a particular world view. This is a circumstantial ad Hominem and a fallacy in which one attempts to attack a claim by asserting that the person making the claim is making it simply out of self interest.

That’s the way the world works my friend. Evidence requires interpretation, the way we interpret the world around us is because of our worldview. It has nothing to do with your self interest, just an inconsistent worldview.

Nope. C14 anomolies in diamonds are just that currently, and you are refusing to accept that a viable hypothesis is contamination.

It’s impossible to contaminate a diamond due to their hardness, sorry.

Are you saying that any serious scientist would include the possibility of there discipline being able to identify a supernatural cause to a natural effect? If you are then I would respectfully question your credentials as a scientist

Oh brother, I gave you the definition of science; it says nothing about the cause being naturalistic. That’s naturalism; the two are not synonymous. If you believe they are then maybe I was right in questioning your credentials. There are many well educated and well published scientists who believe that explanations do not only have to be natural.