[ebaines]

C14 has a half-life of about 5000 years, therefore any attempt to use it to date something to the billions of years would be astronomically inaccurate.

Correct - but pretty acurate at dating something that is, say, 50,000 years old, agreed?

[asking]

Agreed. I have yet to find one who can provide a feasible answer to that question.

I haven't heard anyone posit a feasible answer to that question either.

[asking]

As far as carbon 14, Tom is right that it is used to date materials that are up to about 60,000 years old.

Fortunately, there are other isotopes with much longer half lives that can be used to date older rocks.
Radiometric dating - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[excon]

Agreed. I have yet to find one who can provide a feasible answer to that question.

Hello again, Tj:

I guess I'm the first, then. It's called the big bang. Of course, it's NOT feasible to you. You think the earth is only 6,000 years old. But, it's feasible to lots of people.

Of course, if you want to ask where the singularity that banged came from, I couldn't tell you.

excon

[asking]

To me "feasible" has a kind of engineering Practicality to it. Feasible (to me) means someone could maybe theoretically do it.

To be honest, the whole question of the origin of matter is totally beyond my imagination. I know there's scientific evidence for the big bang, the expanding universe (red shift), the background radiation, etc, but I can no more imagine everything in the world coming into existence at once than I can imagine millions of species popping into existence on a nice perfectly created planet on a Saturday in May. I know. This is a failure of the imagination, but there it is.

Just my two cents.

[excon]

I know. This is a failure of the imagination, but there it is.

Hello asking:

It's well beyond my imagination too. I can't grasp billions and billion of galaxies. Thinking about how many stars that might be gives me a headache.

But, I don't have to grasp it in order to believe it.

excon

[Akoue]

asking, excon:

It's true, imagination cannot grapple with this, largely because what we can imagine is tied in all sorts of ways to our past sensory experiences. We can imagine a unicorn because we've seen horses and we've seen horns. But we've never seen, or perceived by means of any other sensory modality, anything that would give us imaginitive purchase on the singularity that yielded the big bang.

Fortunately, conceivability outruns imaginability. So you can conceive of the big bang, even though your imagination can't put useful images to it. You can't imagine an infinite magnitude, but you can conceive of one. Here's an example: the set of all real numbers. Oh goody! I just conceived of it too!

[asking]

I more or less agree. But I have spent enough time looking through telescopes to feel comfortable with the idea of so many stars and galaxies. They really are all out there! I feel this is graspable in the same way a beach of individual grains of sand is. I get it, in principle at least. But things like the big bang and relativity have, for me, a kind tenuous, "if you say so, I'll take your word for it" quality for me.

I'm going to assume that if Einstein got it wrong, someone would have figured that out by now, but it's not real to me in the way other things are.

Newtonian mechanics feels totally graspable. Evolution is completely real to me. But things I've never really understood and which don't immediately explain anything I need to know... that's harder.

[[Edit: I was addressing what excon said.]]

[asking]

I can conceive of the set of all real numbers because it is an abstraction. I cannot conceive of the big bang, except as a superficial illustration in a magazine. To me that is a cheat.


Edit: I should add that I was on a tour at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) a few months ago and they showed us a 3 D movie of the universe forming. It was bizarre and engrossing and beautiful. But I still can't imagine it in the way I mean.

[ebaines]

Edit: I should add that I was on a tour at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) a few months ago and they showed us a 3 D movie of the universe forming. It was bizarre and engrossing and beautiful. But I still can't imagine it in the way I mean.

The movie would have had to be in 4 dimensions so that you could see 3-dimensional space expanding, which needless to say is impossible to envision. That's why they use analogies like imagining how the 2-D surface of a balloon expands into 3-D space when you inflate it. It's the only way to "see" how space expands.

[Tj3]

Correct - but pretty acurate at dating something that is, say, 50,000 years old, agreed?

Actually, the numbers are reliable or at a much lower number of years. And even then you need to take into account assumptions. Such as the method is only entire accurate for an uncontaminated sample (hard to achieve in nature).

So billions? I don't think so.

[Tj3]

Hello again, Tj:
I guess I'm the first, then. It's called the big bang. Of course, it's NOT feasible to you. You think the earth is only 6,000 years old. But, it's feasible to lots of people.

Of course, if you want to ask where the singularity that banged came from, I couldn't tell you.

Then explain to us how the first cell came to be.

[asking]

Originally Posted by excon
Hello again, Tj:
I guess I'm the first, then. It's called the big bang. Of course, it's NOT feasible to you. You think the earth is only 6,000 years old. But, it's feasible to lots of people.

Of course, if you want to ask where the singularity that banged came from, I couldn't tell you.

Then explain to us how the first cell came to be.

This seems like a complete nonsequitor.

[Tj3]

This seems like a complete nonsequitor.

You mean claiming that I said something that I did not say?

[NeedKarma]

You mean claiming that I said something that I did not say?

non sequitur - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

[asking]

Non sequitur.
Sorry about my spelling.
I do somewhat better in my native English.

[firmbeliever]

Since we have fresh blood in this thread now (yay!), can we clarify the question?

Eeeeks, now you are scaring me! :eek:

I agree with Asking;
Shelesh, could you please clarify what exactly we are talking about here?thanks.

[Tj3]

non sequitur - Definition from the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

Ho hum - we are really getting a very picky bunch on here aren't we. If only those who are so picky were more precise.

A logic fallacy cannot have been committed based upon a faulty prermise (i.e. a mis-quote). Therefore her conclusion is wrong.

[classyT]

Hello again, Tj:

I guess I'm the first, then. It's called the big bang. Of course, it's NOT feasible to you. You think the earth is only 6,000 years old. But, it's feasible to lots of people.

Of course, if you want to ask where the singularity that banged came from, I couldn't tell you.

excon

Ex,

Thought I would enlighten you on Christians since you think we are all brainwashed. Not all Christians think the world is 6000 years old. My father is a devout Christian and brilliant in the word of God and he thinks it is billions of years old. I'm not sure myself. What I can't figure out is how you think a so called "big bang" just happened. Is it easier for you to believe that out of chaos perfect order was formed? Please... I ain't got enough FAITH to believe that. :p

[Tj3]

Ex,

Thought i would enlighten you on Christians since you think we are all brainwashed. Not all Christians think the world is 6000 years old. My father is a devout Christian and brilliant in the word of God and he thinks it is billions of years old. I'm not sure myself. What i can't figure out is how you think a so called "big bang" just happened. Is it easier for you to believe that out of chaos perfect order was formed? Please...i ain't got enough FAITH to believe that. :p

There are many Christians who believe that the world is billions of years old. I used to be a very strong believer in that myself, so I understand and accept that to be true. I understand why they believe what they do. I was involved in doing exactly what we see others on here doing - trying to refute those who believe in creation and a young earth.

Let me take a few moments to summarize what I went through to bring me to where I am today. Some of the challenges that I was faced with from those who disagreed with me at that time took more research. While I was doing my research to refute these people who, I thought at the time, were so obviously ignoring the evidence, I discovered things that I could no longer ignore, both in scripture and in science.

It took a while, and for a while I fell back to a more comfortable position which I felt covered the problem, and that is theistic evolution. The believe that God used evolution, that the earth really is billions of years old and that Genesis was the story of evolution being described as the stages of creation, explained away by the phrase "a day is as a thousand years with the Lord". But as I tried to defend that position, I found it was the least defensible, and instead of holding to that position for the long period of years that I believed in evolution, my stint in theistic evolution was short.

As a Christian, a man of science, a researcher, and a man of logic, I simply could no longer fool myself into accepting evolution. I made a 180 turnaround into a position that I have now held for as long as I was an evolutionist.

You will find that those who ridicule the YEC (Young Earth Creationists) most often use ridicule as their response. We have seen it on here, ridiculing how anyone could possible be so ignorant. And yet do you see any validation of their position? I asked the evolutionists on many threads, on many boards (including this board) to provide evidence of evolution, and to date nothing.

For Christians, evolution or OEC (Old Earth Creation) is a problem because if the story of Adam and Eve is false, then what happens to the gospel? How did sin enter the world? Why does the New Testament deal explicitly with Adam as a real man, even placing him in the genealogy of Jesus? If Genesis is just a story, where does the story end and history begin - show me the verse.

These are some of the issues that I dealt with from a theological perspective. From a scientific perspective there are some equally big hurdles. I have raised some of the questions on this board and others and so often the same answers come back - ridicule, but never a solid scientific response.

There are many excellent scientists, many of the secular who are quite open about admitting the problems that evolution brings with it. Some other scientists are less open and prefer to not admit the issues but rather staunchly close their eyes and say that it has been proven. If so, where is the proof?

Some people say that we cannot know either way. I disagree with them, but I find that a more honest position than to deny the issues and claim that evolution is a fact. I don't mind people who say that they don't know. If a person will admit that, then they may be able to look at the evidence objectively.

Anyway, sorry for the long-winded story, but it may help those who are interested to know that my background is not that of a YEC, but rather of an evolutionist who was dragged kicking and screaming into accepting the evidence which was contrary to what I wanted to believe.