Why Do You Believe That The Earth Is 4.54 Billion Years Old? (Mary, Christianity)
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If you have a pair of eyes in your head and two brain cells to rub together you can see for yourself that the earth must be incredibly old. It doesn't take any kind of genius.
Just go and look at a picture of the tectonic plates and see for yourself how the continents have drifted. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Obviously this didn't happen overnight, it took many millions of years. It's right there for you to look at. Just look at a map, it's blindingly obvious.
Go and learn about the formation of mountains and valleys. Go and learn about earthquakes and how they affect the landscape. Go and look at some rocks and learn how they formed. Go and learn about volcanoes. Go out and look at the landscape around you. For heavens sakes I learned about it in primary school.
The question is: how can you believe the earth is not billions of years old?
Last edited by Cruithne; 12-11-2014 at 01:03 PM..
Reason: usual typo
Rifleman would have chimed in now with a colourful post no doubt...
My contribution to these discussion comes from my neck of the woods where most YEC have never visited.
Starting with the Victoria waterfalls that has 9 gorges that date to around 100,000 years old, based on known erosion rates and in a relatively flat area of Africa devoid of any volcanic activity (at least in the last 6,00 years. Cited as one of the 7 wonders of the world in times past.
Seen here from the air from the upstream of the falls in a very dry season.
Not enough evidence?
We move onto cave formations and in my back yard we have the two oldest formations. Sudwala caves (around 1.5 billion years old) and the Cango caves which is still active and a tad younger. None of the aforementioned ice bridge theories work in South Africa as the antarctic is too far away.
Which brings us ironically to THE most solid piece of evidence against a global fludd. I dunno about the USA, but back home here, ice does this;
Now those pesky scientists have taken Antarctic ice cores and the dating varies between 400,000 and 780,000 years. Bear in mind, precipitation of snow here is about two inches a year. Soo the WWII planes in Greenland (a glacier, different ice) does not negate the layers which recorded known volcanic eruptions in recent history. Pity that ice floats no?
In the back yard of the US, you have some of the oldest living trees and yuppers, we do not have to chop 'em down to count the rings, we also core into the trunk. These are older than the alleged bible creation of 6000 years. The oldest known tree is 9000+ years old and is in Switzerland.
Now my dearly departed friend Rifleman was always on about lake varves which are are annual sediment layers formed in lakes in certain environments. These are everywhere and river deltas also record sedimentary deposits over millions of years.
Lastly, that damn rainbow.... Well we all know now about light refraction and the spectrum of light. So no it was not a covenant of gawd with capt. Noah. Rainbows exist everywhere there is sun and water present and (gasp) even in oil slicks on a wet tarred road.
With all this real evidence, how can any sane person believe in YEC or a global fludd makes me feel like this
Thanks, seeker SA. While erosion and ice cores don't give such ancient dates (I believe the oldest Ice -core is a million years old) the argument about the erosion of the Grand canyon into hard granite asserts that a year - long flooding and even run -off afterwards would not do that. You would need millions of years of erosion.
Your point about the Greenland planes was a good rerminder, too, Have to thank Eusebius for raising that objection to ice cores on the grounds that the Lightnings (were they Lightnings?) had sunk deep into the ice in a mere sixty or so years, so it was silly to claim that ice cores showed levels back thousands of years. As you say, frequent precipitation creates a totally different environment.
I recall that the lategreat C34 objected to ancient fossils (1) on the grounds that hats, cats and prats hung up in limestone caverns were coated with limestone in a decade, and some timbers sunk in a muddy lake became 'petrified' in a year. The conditions are different. dripping lime- water deposits very quickly and impregnation of wood with minerals also is quick. The process of true fossilisation takes a lot longer, though not as long as I once thought. Yes, I, too, had the idea that a fossil was old because it took millions of years to form. In fact it could be a lot quicker, though probably still in hundred thousands of years (though I may be wrong - it may be as quick as mere thousands) but the point is that fossils are not millions of years old because they are fossils, they are millions of years old because they are found in rocks that are millions of years old.
(1) in was in connection with one of the genuine Ark sites where I objected the idea of the wood being fossilized so that it was indistinguishable from ordinary rock in just a few thousand years.
If you have a pair of eyes in your head and two brain cells to rub together you can see for yourself that the earth must be incredibly old. It doesn't take any kind of genius.
Just go and look at a picture of the tectonic plates and see for yourself how the continents have drifted. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle. Obviously this didn't happens overnight, it took many millions of years. It's right there for you to look at. Just look at a map, it's blindingly obvious.
Go and learn about the formation of mountains and valleys. Go and learn about earthquakes and how they affect the landscape. Go and look at some rocks and learn how they formed. Go and learn about volcanoes. Go out and look at the landscape around you. For heavens sakes I learned about it in primary school.
The question is: how can you believe the earth is not billions of years old?
By those with a very poor or no understanding of science reading sites and books written to sound scientific and factual but are only full of distortions and misdirections. For example one of the links to a scientific publication was to a site that claimed to be academic but was a pair of brothers running it and yet the poster who linked to it cited it as scientific proof.
I am not sure if they are warned not be believe scientists or only go to sites that confirm their personal believes but there is so much easily accessable information that clearly demonstrates how science works and how inaccurate any of the creationists sites are,
On the flip side of it though in reading a book about the history of the flat earth many have been,according to her studies, wrong in claiming the church taught a flat earth. According to the book only a few clerics in the first couple of centuries thought that and they had little influence. It was a fundamentalists in Britian in either the 18th century or the 1800s who pushed forward this idea. And that was long after Megellan. I only read the first quarter of the book and need to take it out of the library again but it is a thick well documented book that I would recommend for those who "attack" religion and accuse it of being in a flat earth.
I try to learn at least one new thing per year or at least one per decade.
By those with a very poor or no understanding of science reading sites and books written to sound scientific and factual but are only full of distortions and misdirections. For example one of the links to a scientific publication was to a site that claimed to be academic but was a pair of brothers running it and yet the poster who linked to it cited it as scientific proof.
I am not sure if they are warned not be believe scientists or only go to sites that confirm their personal believes but there is so much easily accessable information that clearly demonstrates how science works and how inaccurate any of the creationists sites are,
On the flip side of it though in reading a book about the history of the flat earth many have been,according to her studies, wrong in claiming the church taught a flat earth. According to the book only a few clerics in the first couple of centuries thought that and they had little influence. It was a fundamentalists in Britian in either the 18th century or the 1800s who pushed forward this idea. And that was long after Megellan. I only read the first quarter of the book and need to take it out of the library again but it is a thick well documented book that I would recommend for those who "attack" religion and accuse it of being in a flat earth.
I try to learn at least one new thing per year or at least one per decade.
I feel very sorry for people who in this day and age have not had a basic enough education to tell the difference between what is distorted and what is fact.
I went to a very bog standard elementary school and I mean bog standard. We were very poor working class kids. But I clearly remember going on geology field trips and learning about scree slopes and hills and glaciers and weathering and valleys etc etc. As I said its basic, basic elementary kids stuff.
I hope there aren't too many people out there who haven't had a basic enough education without having learnt this already without having to rely on the internet.
If there are then, without being facetious in any way, I recommend as a starting point, any publication by Dorling Kindersley - basic kids books but always reliable and very nicely illustrated.
Here's one to start:
The most trusted nonfiction series on the market, Eyewitness Books provide an in-depth, comprehensive look at their subjects with a unique integration of words and pictures.
How are earthquakes recorded? How was the Grand Canyon formed? How much of the Earth's surface is covered by water? Where do icebergs originate? With full-color photography and 3-D models of geological equipment, rocks, and minerals..... That one is for age 8 and up
You are correct, badlander...It was going to be an Atheist Axiom, but it isn't snappy enough... "Atheists should avoid distortions of the truth. Theist apologists can afford to be caught out misrepresenting facts all the time, but for an atheist, once is near disaster."
It is necessary to be honest and say that the flat earth is indeed the picture of earth given in the Bible (1) which was the worldview in ancient times. But the church itself (apart from one or two clerics, as you point out) never made a fetish of a flat earth as it did with the Ptolemaic geocentric system. That in fact originated in the late 18th or early 19th c when one lay gentleman talked himself into believing that the scientists were wrong and the earth was flat. He gave a lot of speeches, issued pamphlets and had debates where he exhibited all the methods familiar from those who try to debunk science here.
Gradually, of course the case came under increasing pressure and the use of the Bible to back it up came quite late. At no time did any of the churches side with him. When it was exported over the pond, it took off almost as fast as flying saucers in the 50's. It could have become a Bible-cult like anti evolution, but it didn't. So, instead of Bible - literalists trying to maintain that the world is flat, they argue that the Bible doesn't say it is.
(1) and please, everyone, let us not have the circle of the earth argument presented yet again. It is done to death and is in the Bible text a flat circle (heb. chwg) not a sphere (dwr).
First and foremost, Carbon-14 is a dating process by which we know we can only go back about 70,000 years or so. And, there is also a correction that has to be accounted for because radioactive Carbon-14 can be induced.
Carbon-14 can also only be used on once-living objects. 20,000 years from now, when scientists dig up my grandmother's replacement hip, it's not going to give an accurate date. Nor is mortar from an English castle going to give an accurate date so right away I'm skeptical of where this info comes from. Then again, I'm not sure of what mortar was made of back then so I suppose it's possible to confer a reasonable date from medieval mortar if living organisms were used.
The OP, who clearly is uneducated on the topic, assumes that we're using Carbon-14 dating to date the entire age of the Earth to 4.54 billion years. His ignorance on the topic clearly indicates he knows nothing about half-lives, basic chemistry, or different dating methods with converging test vectors.
The OP implies that if we are to assume a global flood, then the Carbon-14 ratios would be all out of whack and therefore nothing is accurate. Even if we are to grant the OP this outlandish and non-evidenced based chain of events, it still does not account for the converging test data based on multiple different dating methods to include Potassium-Argon dating with a Potassium 40 half-life of about 1.25 billion years. Even better, there is also the Uranium-238 to Lead-206 half-life of about.... 4.5 billion years.
Math, that unique way of representing reality in an elitist and "know it all" way, also shows these relationships quite well.
A = A௦ℇ^kt
Is a good place to start. A is going to be how much we have left. A௦ is how much we started with. ℇ^kt is Euler's Constant raised to the known half-life constant (number of alpha particles emitted per second) of the material times the time.
We can solve this mathematically for t by using natural logarithms and a little algebra to kick our exponent down to something workable. And, in the end, we can plot out the amount of U-238 as a function of time and it'll look something like this:
So, yeah, when I can mathematically model reality based on scientific data or vice versa, then yes, I tend to have a pretty safe feeling about our assumptions. Of course, I suppose Creationists could model the Age of the Earth as a function of the number of begats in the Bible but there's something about that that seems far less accurate...
I remember reading a Dainiken -type book or maybe someone posted in the old days, where there was argument about C14 dating a Mesoamerican stone statue. It struck me at the time that you couldn't do this with c14 as stone objects do not absorb carbon in 'Life' as they do not live nor give of radiative C14 when they die and stone does not die.
It could only be dated by some organic material attached to the image and of course that gives no real clue to the date of the object.
The same applies to mortar. Moss growing on it gives no clue as to the date of the mortar, but it is sometimes possible to find pieces or organic material mixed in with the mortar. One has to be careful. Leaves or straw would probably be contemporary, but a bit of bone or wood could be a lot older. It certainly would give a most recent date though - the mortar couldn't be any older than the material found in it.
The earth is less than 100 years old. It came into existence the day I was born and will vanish the day I die. The world revolves around me. It's all about ME!!!
Here is where you get jammed up cupper: "God exists" and "The Bible/Koran/etc is true" are believed by the VAAAAAAAST majority of the people that have ever lived. So much so, they are considered "World Standards of Understanding"...their veracity notwithstanding. If you expect them to consider a concept contrary to that (true or not)...YOU will have to prove YOUR position.
I'll use this analogy:
Regardless of all the scientific meteorological evidence against it...I have most people BELIEVING FOR SURE that it is going to snow 2 feet tomorrow in NY City, USA.
Now...how is the FACT that it isn't going to snow at all, let alone two feet, going to effect shovel sales if most people believe it's going to snow 2 feet anyway?
See what I mean now?
It doesn't matter if Theists are wrong and Atheists are right...or if Atheists are wrong and Theists are right...as respects the effect on the world that 98% of the people that have ever lived embraced Theism!
That a small minority are NonBelievers doesn't mean squat, even if they were/are totally "right"! The FACT that the vast majority DID/DO believe GUARANTEES what they think IS going to rule and dominate!
Sometimes what is "right" will also be the most popular...and then it will carry "super mojo". Like "God Exists" does!!
But, in the contest of "What is Right/True" VS "What is the Most Popular"...What is the Most Popular will win 999 times out of 1000.
Gldnrule, old pal, that is nothing to do with the topic.
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