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There have been some good post on this thread. Maybe we need a sticky on the 'evolution' debate because it gets involved. There was one post that listed a lot of evolutionary genetics papers. I'm still working through and Kdbrich refused to look. Understandable. We need to pick out the 'cold hard facts' that one of our posters insists don't exist and set out the evidence.
We need the evidence for an old earth. So much of geological science and palaeontological science is based on the idea that rocks are old. I'm a layman. I can't prove that the dates are really old. I accept that science has good evidence but it's not easy to go back and find the proof of that. On an atheist thread, I think it would be handy if some knowledgable bods found that and stickied it.
Well basic proof that radiometry works is really easy to explain but it requires the dreaded "calculus". PM me if you wish on it.
Creationists don't really like to talk at all about it because
1. It's really just them admitting not only that they think biology is wrong but somehow have to fit physics and mathematics itself into their evil atheist conspiracy theories.
2. They are absolute hypocrites when it comes to it. Say you carbon test the shroud of turin and it comes out as being around 2000 years old, they will use the test as proof and parade the results around gloriously. If someone does the exact same test on anything else and it comes out to be more than 10000 years old, then they will reject the test and come up with a woeful list of apologetics including making the claim that everything was highly radioactive 100+ years ago.
3. They tend to show even greater ignorance in these topics than in evolution and fall prey to the millions of lies on the web. An example of this that occurs very often is when you see a creationist repeating the lie that carbon testing is wrong because they tested a newly formed rock and it said the rock was 2 billion years old. When you point out that this is in fact impossible(carbon testing only gives you ages below 50,000 years), they will try immediately try to change the subject by posting more ludicrous claims.
Then there is the problem of copy and paste syndrome from creationist websites.
BTW, if you want real sense of WONDER then consider this:
Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older that the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you.
The number of individual beings which could be standing here in your place vastly outnumber all of the grains of sand, on all of the beaches, in all of the world. You're the inheritor of a genetic legacy which stretches back 3.8 billion years through the eons, and which has circled the center of our galaxy about 20 times. You're the endpoint of billions of generations of births, competitions, wars, and deaths; the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that can possibly result in you. Your forbears have survived arguably the single greatest ecological catastrophe ever to hit the planet; when the earliest plants started poisoning the atmosphere with oxygen. Yet, your ancestors learned to use this poisonous gas to produce energy in a way that had never been attempted before; an evolutionary triumph which paved the way for the first multicellular life. Your genetic line has survived floods, freezes, and meteor impacts from the skies themselves, preserving this single genetic line through the eons to lead ultimately to you. This is a legacy you share with every living thing on earth, from the largest creature ever to have lived; the blue whale; to the lowliest prion. You share this legacy with the blades of grass between your toes and the trees that give you shade. You are a thread in a huge, amazing, incredibly diverse tapestry of living things; some of whom have clawed their way out of the seas to survive on land, some of whom remained in the ocean, and a few of whom stood on land for a few million years, ultimately said "well, **********" and marched back into the sea. Once we add cosmology into the mix, not only does this legacy stretch to everything living, but to the non-living as well. You share your origins with the stars and planets. The asteroids which hang in space, all the way down to the loneliest hydrogen atom in deep space. All the parts that make you stretch back through the eons and have borne witness to the very birth of the universe. They have seen the birth and death of stars, supernovae, black holes and pulsars. They've seen planets torn to pieces and solar systems form. They've seen galaxies coalesce and skies darken.
The universe is much more grand, more amazing, more beautiful, more elegant and more subtle than has ever been written in any holy book, and you are here, against nigh-incalculable odds, to see it all.
Just consider that for a moment.
I luv this, I really do. I know others will too. Ok now....here is what I'm getting from this. Now I love my momma. But she was a hard woman. Ok....she was the meanest Mom in the valley, and the things she has done have made me the person I am today. I smile with relief to know it's not me that matters but the DNA I have available to me before birth. Thank God. I had been thinking of myself as the most incredible drunkard alive the day I chose her to be my mom. Looks like maybe she was the only one on the charts to choose. And if that is the case than Astrology DOES matter. For time and place may take precedence over who you are born to. Looks like you cant be born to just anybody. Looks like you have to share their DNA or something. But I swear I really do love my Momma.....I swear.
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