How do you know God isn't dead?

[little_monkey]

You see physics works when it deals with computers, the internet, satellite communication, sending a man to the moon, saving your ass with an MRI, but dating rocks??? Are you kiddin me?

[Statler Waldorf]

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

It’s also hard to kill one that cannot die.

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.

And I am bluntly telling you that you do not understand your own theory. According to the theory neutral mutations become fixed in a population through the process known as genetic drift. In genetic drift each subsequent organism is viewed as a trial. It works perfectly in simplistic models, but at the genetic level there are too many variables and too much information and not enough trials to fix these neutral mutations through genetic drift (even if we grant you 10^46 organisms throughout Earth’s history). This is why Evolutionists like Dawkins emphasize fixation through natural selection over the neutral theory.

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

The insurance company?

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?
[/quote]

Either you reject radiometric dating, which means you probably wouldn’t be asking me such a question, or you accept it and also accept the unverifiable assumptions it’s founded upon and therefore refute your verificationism; I figure it’s the latter.
I did answer your question, it depends on what sort of assumption we are talking about.

TLDR version:

Hello Pocaracas,
In the interest of trimming this down a bit I’ll respond to your abridged version and if there is anything in particular you want me to address in the longer version please let me know and I’ll address it. Sound fair enough?

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.

I am sure you are aware that all rocks that do not agree with the dates they are looking for are tossed out. If all of your methods are based off of the same assumptions, and those assumptions are wrong then you are going to get consistent but wrong dates. I want rocks of empirically verifiable age accurately dated by the method, unfortunately that’s never been done before.

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.

If you’re making assumptions that would be wrong if the Creation model were true and then using those assumptions to argue against the Creation model then that’s begging the question.

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.

Natural laws are descriptive, not normative, so they could very well have been different in the past. However, the decay rate of a nuclear isotope itself is not a law of physics it’s merely an observable rate; we know rates vary.

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.

Again, Creationists believe in the uniformity of natural law, but that is not the same thing as the assumption of uniformitarianism, which they reject. You actually reject this assumption as well when it serves your model, for example you believe the observed lunar recession rate due to tidal friction was far slower in the past because of supposed global ice ages even though according to the laws of physics it should have been faster in the past. Creationists believe nuclear decay rates were different in the past due to a global flood. Why are you allowed to violate the assumption but they are not?

Thus the creationist dismisses consistent independently corroborated assumptions, while retaining the fully unsupported assumption that those people wrote reality.
Talk about intellectual dishonesty!

Yes, there’s some intellectual dishonesty at play here, but it’s not on the part of the Creationists. You know good and well that radiometric dating does not always yield consistent results, you also know that it does not accurately date rocks of known age, you also know now that there are dating methods that contradict its results (i.e. lunar recession, soft tissue in pre-historic fossils, and the faint young sun paradox). Let’s not overplay your hand my friend.

You see physics works when it deals with computers, the internet, satellite communication, sending a man to the moon, saving your ass with an MRI, but dating rocks??? Are you kiddin me?

Why are you confusing historical sciences with empirical sciences? For a mistake that’s far too great, even for you. It is kind of funny that you brought up sending a man to the moon (which was spearheaded by a young Earth creationist) and the MRI (which was invented by a young Earth creationist), you cannot make this stuff up; life is fantastically ironic.

[little_monkey]

Why are you confusing historical sciences with empirical sciences?

No you are. Dating rocks is solid empiricasl science.

It is kind of funny that you brought up sending a man to the moon (which was spearheaded by a young Earth creationist) and the MRI (which was invented by a young Earth creationist), you cannot make this stuff up; life is fantastically ironic.

You can say that about Galileo, Newton, and every scientists up to the 19th century. In those days, that's all these people knew when it came to our origin. Darwin changed the paradigm. Here's a poll for you to reflect on:

Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...923AAPMK2D

Do the calculation: 700/480,000= .0015 or .15%, less than 1%.

Funny, but in the US, 46% of the population still believe in creationism. Incidentally, the same percentage of people identify with the Republican party. Coincidence? I think not.

[pocaracas]

TLDR version:

Hello Pocaracas,
In the interest of trimming this down a bit I’ll respond to your abridged version and if there is anything in particular you want me to address in the longer version please let me know and I’ll address it. Sound fair enough?

That'll do fine... If you hadn't done it, I'd start using the TLDR versioin on my next post (or this one!)

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.

I am sure you are aware that all rocks that do not agree with the dates they are looking for are tossed out. If all of your methods are based off of the same assumptions, and those assumptions are wrong then you are going to get consistent but wrong dates. I want rocks of empirically verifiable age accurately dated by the method, unfortunately that’s never been done before.

Aye, not all rocks agree.... that's because the Earth is far from static and rocks mix and mingle, ending up with young rock contaminating old rocks. If the person taking the sample is not careful with it, contamination becomes easy.

Not all methods are based on the same assumptions. but I guess you know that, but choose to ignore it. more dishonesty...

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.

If you’re making assumptions that would be wrong if the Creation model were true and then using those assumptions to argue against the Creation model then that’s begging the question.

No,nonononononononoNO.
I'm simply trying to put myself in your shoes... for once (didn't like it, will avoid it at all costs).
You say the assumptions must be wrong because they disagree with your book. Or is that not the reason why you claim the assumptions present in all dating mechanisms must be wrong?

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.

Natural laws are descriptive, not normative, so they could very well have been different in the past. However, the decay rate of a nuclear isotope itself is not a law of physics it’s merely an observable rate; we know rates vary.

They could have been different, but there's no evidence supporting that view.... And what sort of force(s)/field(s) would make them different, oh great and powerful, all-knowing, creationist?
About the decay rate of nuclear isotopes...Indeed the exponential decay is experimentally derived... and, as such, only based of the limited temporal span of the experiment.... But it fits oh so well to the curve... And nature likes exponentials only too much... and there's no reason to think that the exponential turns into something else as we go back... Why? I told you! Short lived radionuclides follow the exponential to the letter. Long lived ones behave similarly in the lab, for new fresh off a volcano rocks, for Mt Vesuvius rocks, and others.... If they follow the same exponential law regardless of their age, then why would we even dream that they followed a different law in the remote past?

OH yeah.... the laws of physics must have changed in the meantime... -.-'

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.

Again, Creationists believe in the uniformity of natural law, but that is not the same thing as the assumption of uniformitarianism, which they reject. You actually reject this assumption as well when it serves your model, for example you believe the observed lunar recession rate due to tidal friction was far slower in the past because of supposed global ice ages even though according to the laws of physics it should have been faster in the past. Creationists believe nuclear decay rates were different in the past due to a global flood. Why are you allowed to violate the assumption but they are not?

Global flood causing radioactive decays to change?! What was that flood made of?!
Sorry, but this has got to go in here!



About the moon, the radioisotope dating methods have placed the moon at ~4.5 Billion years old. That matches quite well with the oldest rocks on Earth.
When do rocks begin to age? When they cool off. When they pass from the lava state to a rock state.

So all we know is that the rocks on the moon's surface were lava ~4.5 Billion years ago.
That and the fact that the moon is seen as drifting away has led some people to speculate that the moon and earth are remnants from a collision of other two proto-planets... It's speculation, just as the idea that the moon was drifting in space and was caught by the Earth's gravity.... the speeds were just right to keep it in orbit.... and the two planets were just created at the same time, based on the same original materials... like Mars, and Venus...

Also, you've probably noticed that the moon is pockmarked with crater impacts. Each of those can tug the moon closer or farther from the Earth... Thus rendering any calculations based on the present drifting speed quite inaccurate.

Now do tell me there's a similar process that, in the past, hampered or facilitated radioactive decay... -.-'

Thus the creationist dismisses consistent independently corroborated assumptions, while retaining the fully unsupported assumption that those people wrote reality.
Talk about intellectual dishonesty!

Yes, there’s some intellectual dishonesty at play here, but it’s not on the part of the Creationists.

really?.... -.-'

You know good and well that radiometric dating does not always yield consistent results, you also know that it does not accurately date rocks of known age,

Enjoy your reading... do try to follow the references.
http://ncse.com/rncse/20/3/radiometric-dating-does-work

you also know now that there are dating methods that contradict its results (i.e. lunar recession, soft tissue in pre-historic fossils, and the faint young sun paradox). Let’s not overplay your hand my friend.

Lunar recession... yeah, there are some problems there so you don't want to keep it as a contradicting example.
Soft tissue... it seems you're still not reading the article. Let me bring it up from memory: they say they've found fossilized soft tissue. Fossilized. As in, turned to rock. All they have are the arrangement of the soft tissue... not the soft tissue itself. Read the damned article if you want more details.
Faint young sun? what is this new thing you bring up? Googling.....
No climate paradox under the faint early Sun... oops, you did it again!


And then you have the independent experiments that confirm radiometric dating.
Here's a nice article on it, I'm linking page 5 because I know you don't like reading these things too much and this is the page where all the intro material finally boils down to a number: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/p...sun_5.html
Oh, yeah... it's from a Nobel laureate. Have fun.

[The Reality Salesman01]

...damn

[The Grand Nudger]

but at the genetic level there are too many variables and too much information and not enough trials to fix these neutral mutations through genetic drift (even if we grant you 10^46 organisms throughout Earth’s history).

Too many variables, you mean 1 variable comprised of 2 possible outcomes is too many? Which mutations? Why would drift require so many generations? Can you say "bottleneck"?

Moreover, how would anything you've said modify any statement I've made - and how would any of it support any criticism of modern synthesis- or any other claim you've made about what a mutation must be?

[CriticalBen]

Well, it's kind of hard to tell, it's not like the god some believe in are doing anything for our world.

[smax]

Well, it's kind of hard to tell, it's not like the god some believe in are doing anything for our world.

True story. Glad someone understood the point of this thread.

[Statler Waldorf]

No you are. Dating rocks is solid empiricasl science.

No it’s not; age is not an empirically measurable property of matter.

You can say that about Galileo, Newton, and every scientists up to the 19th century. In those days, that's all these people knew when it came to our origin. Darwin changed the paradigm. Here's a poll for you to reflect on:

We visited the Moon and the MRI was invented in the 20th Century.

Taking into account only those working in the relevant fields of earth and life sciences, there are about 480,000 scientists, but only about 700 believe in "creation-science" or consider it a valid theory

Irrelevant, scientific facts are not determined by majority opinion or consensus in the scientific community; you should know that.

Aye, not all rocks agree.... that's because the Earth is far from static and rocks mix and mingle, ending up with young rock contaminating old rocks. If the person taking the sample is not careful with it, contamination becomes easy.

Not all methods are based on the same assumptions. but I guess you know that, but choose to ignore it. more dishonesty...

How do you know the disagreements are due to contamination and not to a fundamental error with the method? Secondly, they do all hold the same assumption, uniformitarianism.

You say the assumptions must be wrong because they disagree with your book. Or is that not the reason why you claim the assumptions present in all dating mechanisms must be wrong?

No, I am saying you cannot argue that my book is wrong because of your dating methods because they all adhere to assumptions that presuppose my book is wrong. So you are essentially assuming the Bible is not the word of God in order to argue that the Bible is not the word of God and therefore wrong about the Earth’s history.

They could have been different, but there's no evidence supporting that view.... And what sort of force(s)/field(s) would make them different, oh great and powerful, all-knowing, creationist?

Again, forces are a descriptive term; if the decay rates underwent a period of accelerated decay the forces would have been different during that period of time.

About the decay rate of nuclear isotopes...Indeed the exponential decay is experimentally derived... and, as such, only based of the limited temporal span of the experiment.... But it fits oh so well to the curve... And nature likes exponentials only too much... and there's no reason to think that the exponential turns into something else as we go back... Why? I told you! Short lived radionuclides follow the exponential to the letter. Long lived ones behave similarly in the lab, for new fresh off a volcano rocks, for Mt Vesuvius rocks, and others.... If they follow the same exponential law regardless of their age, then why would we even dream that they followed a different law in the remote past?

Well Nature doesn’t like anything, that’s reification. I would expect the laboratory short lived isotopes to follow the curve because they didn’t go through the conditions which produced the periods of accelerated decay in the Earth’s history while the older ones did. Now if by short lived isotopes you are referring to supposedly extinct isotopes then I would argue that actually supports the idea of periods of accelerated nuclear decay in the past.

OH yeah.... the laws of physics must have changed in the meantime... -.-'

Accelerated nuclear decay doesn’t violate any laws of physics, it merely violates your uniformitarian assumptions and there is nothing wrong with that.

Global flood causing radioactive decays to change?! What was that flood made of?!

Well most of the accelerated decay would have taken place during the creation week, but the flood would have affected the closed system assumption that the dating method is founded upon.

About the moon, the radioisotope dating methods have placed the moon at ~4.5 Billion years old. That matches quite well with the oldest rocks on Earth.

Yes but according to the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum the Moon is far younger than 1.38 Billion years old, so now are you asserting the laws of physics were different in the Earth’s past?

Also, you've probably noticed that the moon is pockmarked with crater impacts. Each of those can tug the moon closer or farther from the Earth... Thus rendering any calculations based on the present drifting speed quite inaccurate.

That seems like quite the Ad Hoc hypothesis. It’d take quite the meteorite to effect the Moon’s recession that greatly, and I am not aware of any evidence suggesting a meteorite of that magnitude ever struck the Moon. A better conclusion would be that your radiometric dating method is just flawed since it requires more assumptions.

Now do tell me there's a similar process that, in the past, hampered or facilitated radioactive decay... -.-'

It’s been demonstrated in the laboratory that several conditions can lead to billions of years’ worth (at present rates) of nuclear decay to occur in very short periods of time.

Enjoy your reading... do try to follow the references.

That paper proves my point; they didn’t get accurate results for the Mt Etna or Mt. St. Helens lava flows. Mt. Etna which was formed 2135 years ago was radio-metrically dated to have formed 250,000 years ago, that’s only 11,610% experimental error! Lava flows from the now 33 year old Mt. St. Helen’s eruption were radio-metrically dated to be between 350,000-2,800,000 years old. Let’s see, that’s only 32,140-8,484,748% experimental error! That’s like asserting a 12” ruler is really 16 miles long! Oops.

Lunar recession... yeah, there are some problems there so you don't want to keep it as a contradicting example.

No problems with the laws of physics.

Soft tissue... it seems you're still not reading the article. Let me bring it up from memory: they say they've found fossilized soft tissue. Fossilized. As in, turned to rock. All they have are the arrangement of the soft tissue... not the soft tissue itself. Read the damned article if you want more details.

No this is incorrect, in the 1990s Dr. Schweitzer’s team found actual hemoglobin in a piece of un-fossilized T-Rex bone, then in 2005 her team discovered soft tissue (blood cells and blood vessels) in a T-Rex bone that was still soft to the touch, in 2007 she and her team found actual protein collagen, so much of the protein was still remaining that it was able to be sequenced, then in 2012 the team found actual DNA (174 base pairs) in dinosaur fossils. Why is actual DNA such a problem? Well because we know it cannot last that long, empirical tests measuring the decay rate of DNA conclude that no traceable amounts could ever be found at the following temperatures and for the following periods of time…

22,000 years at 25°C
131,000 years at 15°C
882,000 years at 5°C
6,800,000 years at –5°C

Retrieved from “The half-life of DNA in bone: measuring decay kinetics in 158 dated fossils” Proceedings of the Royal Society number 279

Since the Earth’s average global temperature is 14.0 degrees C (World Meteorological Organization) it’s safe to assume those bones were not kept at below freezing for the last few million years- so it looks like dinosaurs lived thousands of years ago rather than millions.

Faint young sun? what is this new thing you bring up? Googling.....

You’ve never heard of the Faint Young Sun Paradox? That’s surprising.

No climate paradox under the faint early Sun... oops, you did it again!

Well obviously you actually did it again, not bothering to read your own article, shame on you! This article is incredibly sloppy and I usually expect a bit more from Nature. To suggest that the paradox is solved by appealing to a one-dimensional (vertical) climate model is absurd. When modeling climates a three-dimensional model that takes into account the ocean, biosphere, and cryosphere is always preferred. Not only this but the oversimplification of their model causes them to ignore very important factors such as the ice albedo feedback mechanism. It’s no wonder that this very article led to criticism even in Nature itself.

““Despite all these proposed warming mechanisms, there are still reasons to think that the faint young Sun problem is not yet solved.”- Faint Young Sun Redux in Nature issue 464.

And then you have the independent experiments that confirm radiometric dating.

Perhaps you linked the wrong article because the article you posted has nothing to do with radiometric dating, nor does it contradict the current Creation model because in that model the Sun was created functional. Creationists agree with the proposed source of the Sun’s energy.

Too many variables, you mean 1 variable comprised of 2 possible outcomes is too many? Which mutations? Why would drift require so many generations? Can you say "bottleneck"?

You oversimplify the reality of this problem. Even if we were dealing with neutral mutations within a single gene in a single type of organism within a population there would never be enough trials to ensure that the neutral mutations would ever give rise to a new feature and later become fixed in the population. An average gene contains 1000 base pairs, that’s 10^602 total possible combinations for that particular gene. So even if every atom in the Universe (10^80) were a new generation of organisms that underwent neutral mutation, and we were given a new organism every millisecond for the supposed 15 Billion years the Universe has existed we’d still only have tried 10^100 of the possible outcomes for this gene; and that is just one single gene in one particular species of organism. To suggest that all of the genes in all of the different organisms arose through neutral evolutionary processes is downright laughable. Not only this; but the functional genes within these organisms would also be undergoing mutations which would result in error catastrophe long before our targeted gene ever yielded anything even close to new and useful. You do not have enough organisms and you do not have enough time to make this model even remotely possible.

[The Grand Nudger]

You oversimplify the reality of this problem. Even if we were dealing with neutral mutations within a single gene in a single type of organism within a population there would never be enough trials to ensure that the neutral mutations would ever give rise to a new feature and later become fixed in the population.

Yet "never" manages to happen quite frequently and with very little in the way of impetus. Why do you think that is? Could it be because you have misunderstood genetic drift and selective nuetrality (as you have managed to misunderstand a great deal else about biology) - it would seem so. I notice that throughout our entire conversation you've been piling on more and more qualifiers..as if you're attempting to make my job more difficult by sheer mass of conjecture. It won't work - because we still haven't made it passed the fundamentals. Until you can adequately describe what a mutation "must be" - in order to be passed on or become fixed in a population I won't be moving any further. The correct answer to this - is that it must be non-deleterious. Full stop.

You see, this is very simple. If we have before us a population whose members are spread out unevenly (by genetic makeup) on the right and left sides of some defined area...and I annihilate either side while leaving the other intact - this is an example of genetic drift....and those traits carried unevenly by one side of the area or another will become fixed in the remaining population due to my less than genetically equivalent destruction of the available sources of heredity on other side (not that my intervention seems to be required...but if we're dealing with a sufficiently large population it sure helps to speed the process along). The genes themselves offered nothing in this exchange - neither those advantageous or neutral mutations that may exist in the remaining population are at play - and yet both may become fixed (or lost) going forward. Genetic drift is, simply put, the effect of chance on allele frequency.

An average gene contains 1000 base pairs, that’s 10^602 total possible combinations for that particular gene. So even if every atom in the Universe (10^80) were a new generation of organisms that underwent neutral mutation, and we were given a new organism every millisecond for the supposed 15 Billion years the Universe has existed we’d still only have tried 10^100 of the possible outcomes for this gene; and that is just one single gene in one particular species of organism. To suggest that all of the genes in all of the different organisms arose through neutral evolutionary processes is downright laughable.

Which is probably why it hasn't been suggested. Which leads me to ask why you've spent so much time arguing against it?

Not only this; but the functional genes within these organisms would also be undergoing mutations which would result in error catastrophe long before our targeted gene ever yielded anything even close to new and useful. You do not have enough organisms and you do not have enough time to make this model even remotely possible.

That model would be what? "The Creationist Model of Things I'd Rather Argue Against Than Modern Synthesis"?