A really hard question on Satan and deception.

[5thHorseman]

I think the link speaks volumes.

[Zen Badger]

The bible isn't the "ONLY" evidence, but it is the primary evidence. Now the bible has been under attack for nearly 2000 years, and more rabid atheists than you have tried to take it down. If you think you've cracked it, feel free to take your best shot. I've heard it all before and the error is most certainly on your side of the fence.

Not the only evidence, please prove that statement.

Minimalist would be much better at this than myself, but three off the top of my head would be genesis, since the universe is known to be much older than 6000 years.
Noah and the flood, for which there is no no evidence at all.

And jesus, again no evidence of his life.

[lucent]

I reject bullshit trotted out as evidence, yes. I have a 100% bias against bullshit.

You have a 100 percent bias against Christianity. You said that if God appeared to you you would shoot at Him. Nothing you say on the subject could ever be seen to be remotely objective; ie your reasoning on this is corrupt.

Testable claims regarding origins, history, catastrophic events etc, in short, the entirety of your fairy tale that can be tested.

Actually, archaeology confirms much of the detail of the bible to be historically accurate. There is evidence for origins, history, catastrophic events, etc. Yours is the origin story which is a fairytale for which there is no evidence, the same with your timeline of history, and catastrophic events such as the extinction of the dinosaurs by a wayward comet.

If there were a mechanism by which the things we call "the laws of nature" could be suspended, this universe would not be conducive to the life we find here. If death could be reversed, if the earth could suddenly cease in it's orbit around the sun, the list is long.

Uh huh, so what's the proof of this, and why couldn't God introduce something into the system?

Apparently it isn't so easy, since it's never been done, by yourself or anyone else. Care to take a crack at it?

Apparently it has since Jesus has 2 billion followers today and billions more over the last 2000 years. Plenty of people have been convinced, but according to you they're all delusional and you're the special one who has it all figured out.

You've made a claim with nothing to support it. You'd have to first demonstrate that this thing even exists before you could begin to imply that there is any knowledge to be had, or that I am ignorant of this body of knowledge. Start there.

You've made a claim with nothing to support it; I've told you how to get your evidence. The fact is, you've spent untold amounts of time mocking and discussing my God, but you won't take 5 minutes of time to investigate it. This indicates that you are totally unreasonable. I told you exactly what you need to do, but you refuse to do it.

[Zen Badger]

Actually, archaeology confirms much of the detail of the bible to be historically accurate. There is evidence for origins, history, catastrophic events, etc.

Ok then, let's see it.

[The Grand Nudger]

You have a 100 percent bias against Christianity. You said that if God appeared to you you would shoot at Him. Nothing you say on the subject could ever be seen to be remotely objective; ie your reasoning on this is corrupt.

Actually, archaeology confirms much of the detail of the bible to be historically accurate. There is evidence for origins, history, catastrophic events, etc. Yours is the origin story which is a fairytale for which there is no evidence, the same with your timeline of history, and catastrophic events such as the extinction of the dinosaurs by a wayward comet.

Uh huh, so what's the proof of this, and why couldn't God introduce something into the system?

Apparently it has since Jesus has 2 billion followers today and billions more over the last 2000 years. Plenty of people have been convinced, but according to you they're all delusional and you're the special one who has it all figured out.

You've made a claim with nothing to support it; I've told you how to get your evidence. The fact is, you've spent untold amounts of time mocking and discussing my God, but you won't take 5 minutes of time to investigate it. This indicates that you are totally unreasonable. I told you exactly what you need to do, but you refuse to do it.

I have a 100% bias towards your idiotic parody of what the christian god must be.

Great, lets see that evidence.

Because things that don't exist don't have the ability to introduce anything.

Figuring out your bullshit doesn't even come close to "figuring it all out". Guess all the muslims, buddhists, etc give weight to their claims as well, or maybe this argument only works for what you believe?

Took a little more than five minutes to get where I am amigo, back to the drawing board. You keep repeating the same tired shit without providing any of the evidence I asked for. If you want to be taken seriously, and if you want me to take your god seriously, and if there is such a god, it shouldn't be so seemingly impossible for you to do this.

[lucent]

The bible isn't the "ONLY" evidence, but it is the primary evidence. Now the bible has been under attack for nearly 2000 years, and more rabid atheists than you have tried to take it down. If you think you've cracked it, feel free to take your best shot. I've heard it all before and the error is most certainly on your side of the fence.

Not the only evidence, please prove that statement.

Minimalist would be much better at this than myself, but three off the top of my head would be genesis, since the universe is known to be much older than 6000 years.
Noah and the flood, for which there is no no evidence at all.

And jesus, again no evidence of his life.

The age of the Earth is presumed from tests using radiometric dating which is totally fallable. Some quotes:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

The dating methods are inaccurate and yield a range of results, of which the ones that don't match the theory are thrown away as discrepencies. Dating has been done on rocks known to be hundreds of years old and yielded ages of millions of billions of years.

[The Grand Nudger]

Unfortunately C-14 isn't the only tool available. In fact we specifically worked out other dating methods because we understood the limitations of C-14, try again. There is always debate as to how precise our methods may be, but never any debate as to whether or not the earth is a few thousand years old. That would be ignorant.

Nowhere in that post by the way do I see anything resembling evidence for your argument. Is the strength of your argument entirely in criticizing methods which give results that disagree with your fairy tale? Make your own case.

[5thHorseman]

Lucent are you a young earth creationist?

[The Grand Nudger]

Indeed he is, and he's reduced to complaining about science now because the last time he tried to present his "evidence" it was immediately and thoroughly shit on.

[Zen Badger]

As to radiometric dating,

http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&rct=j&...1DJdaMaeHA

But apart from that, how do you explain plate tectonics, coral reefs, the size of the observable universe, the evidence of molecular genetics, the absence of geology compatible with the flood etc,etc,etc