The key point, which seems to have been missed, is that when rocks of known ages are radiometrically dated, the results are extremely wrong. As a simple double-blind calibration of experimental methodology, this shows that radiometric dating methods currently in use are fatally flawed.
If you run a double-blind test in medicine and prove something is completely ineffective, the medication never sees the market (well, that's how it's supposed to work; thalidomide and other examples indicate that even that process is not without tragic flaws).
Similarly tests run using rocks of known ages produce results for geologists (not just for creationists) that show the methodology is wrong. Whatever the reason, if a method is flawed, it needs to be either fixed or discarded.
One of the most vocal anti-creationist geologists around is G. Brent Dalrymple. He testified against Gentry in the court case about teaching evolution a few years ago, and has written extensively against creationism. Yet his article (Dalrymple, G. B., 1969. 40Ar/36Ar analyses of historic lava flows. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6:47-55) showed five cases of known date rocks producing results that (my conclusion, not his) should disqualify radiometric dating as it is currently practiced.
Hualalai basalt (Hawaii, AD 1800-1801) 1.6 ± 0.16 Ma, 1.41 ± 0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt (Sicily, 122 BC) 0.25 ± 0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt (Sicily, AD 1792) 0.35 ± 0.14 Ma
Mt. Lassen plagioclase (California, AD 1915) 0.11 ± 0.3 Ma
Sunset Crater basalt (Arizona, AD 1064-1065) 0.27 ± 0.09 Ma, 0.25 ± 0.15 Ma
What justification can there be for continuing to use a method known to be wrong? Aside from preserving the jobs and income of those whose livelihood depends on maintaining the intellectual status quo, none occurs to me - anybody out there got a less uncharitable idea?
The age is an interesting question. First is the comment from one of the researchers
someone made an imprint on a surface, walking in a way you'd expect to see someone in these same conditions walk today
So from the footprints themselves, there is no reason they could not be 100 or 500 or 1500 years old. They appear, according to experts, to be indistinguishable from modern footprints.
So why are they considered to be 325000 to 385000 years old? From volcanic dating. Now how accurate is volcanic dating. That's where this gets interesting. Evolutionists hate to have this brought up, but Steve Austin, a geologist with a PhD from Penn State, did an interesting test a while ago. He picked up some rocks inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens from the lava dome. These rocks were definitely formed less than ten years before he picked them up. He sent them to be radiometrically dated, and the results of K-Ar dating of one "whole rock" sample was 345000 to 355000 years. Another was 334000 to 346000.
So what we have here is two known-age (less than ten years) rocks were given dates comparable to the footprint rocks. What scientific basis is there for believing the footprints are any more accurately dated than the known-age rocks? None, since there is no known-age rock from thousands or millions of years ago, no one put one in a time vault with a label on it.
The standard answer by evolutionists and long-age defenders to this set of facts is that Steve Austin is incompetent (note they include no references from his PhD committee defending that point of view) and that he made mistakes selecting the rocks. Even if that were the case, the same mistakes could have been made in the footprint rock selections, yet since the dates come out to be in the same range, no one would think twice about questioning the methodology involved.
Bottom line: science is about doing repeatable experiments to determine things. Radiometric dating is not science, since given known-age rocks, the best labs around return wildly wrong results. If a supposedly scientific method produces known false results, it's not scientific and should be rejected.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work. The idea is that the establishment will presumably stop at nothing to suppress discoveries that might shift the balance of wealth and power in society. Often, the discoverer describes mainstream science as part of a larger conspiracy that includes industry and government. Claims that the oil companies are frustrating the invention of an automobile that runs on water, for instance, are a sure sign that the idea of such a car is baloney. In the case of cold fusion, Pons and Fleischmann blamed their cold reception on physicists who were protecting their own research in hot fusion.
His examples are quite accurate. But there are counter-examples; most radical ideas are attacked by the establishment early on. Galileo is the obvious one (he was actually attacked more by the scientific establishment than the Pope, though certainly the Catholic Church was part of the attempt to suppress). When de Broglie came up with the wavicle concept (1927??) his professors were about to toss him out when they mentioned his idea as a joke to Einstein. Einstein thought it was a brilliant insight, and so he got his PhD and was published. Were it not for that one event, de Broglie's theorem might have taken a lot longer time to gain acceptance.
Timex appealed to the government to block digital watch imports. When they lost, they decided to compete instead of complain, and have done very well since. But most times the entrenched old guard is displaced, which is why they fight so hard to keep the riffraff out.
The point here is simple: there is a tyranny of the status quo. Look at Microsoft - they are not trivial to displace from a monopolistic position; neither are corporations and universities that have a vested interest in gradual instead of rapid, massive change.
Gradualism is always more accepted by the powers that be than revolution. Remember the old adage: evolution not revolution. That's what the powers in place want to see, they do not want to see something that will displace them. And when they hold the power, they will act in their own interest the vast majority of the time. If a Star-Trek transporter were invented, imagine how the airlines and automobile manufacturers would fight it and would fund studies showing how dangerous or energy inefficient it was. Their survival would be at stake, and they'd fight to stay around. Yet their vigor in fighting would not be indicative of whether transporters were useful.
Just a little bit of time with Google and you'll find the most likely answer is it could never have been the Christians, as it was gone before 20 B.C., and since Christ was born around 4 B.C., well, it's obviously not the Christians nor is it the muslims, since they were later in history than the Christians.
For a good summary, see here. Basically Plutarch and Livy both wrote that Caesar was responsible, and they wrote long before the Catholic destruction in 391 of the satellite library.
fairly positive that any type of life can evolve in different types of environments
Please show how life evolved from non-life on this planet (abiogenesis). Once you can prove that, then extrapolating to other environments is a worthwhile exercise. Without that, it's just fiction.
If you read all of Ezekiel 4, you can see that God was assigning Ezekiel a surrogate punishment for the transgressions of Israel. This is just like using Numbers 16 to say a day is a year; forcing that interpretation on the rest of the Bible is ignoring the specific context that each passage contains. If you're going to engage in doing that, then you have to deal with Peter who says in 2Peter 3:8 "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
Neither interpretation (a day is a year or a day is a thousand years) should be used outside its context.
For further details of why this should not be used, see this previous post.
You raise some excellent points. One of the strongest ways to prove the liberal bias is by applying the principles you set out.
Take a mass media news entity over a time span of a month - Newsweek, Time, CNN, CBS, etc. Note the number of times someone is referred to as "conservative", "right-wing", or "jewish/christian". Then compare that with the number of times the balancing words of "liberal", "left-wing", or "humanist/atheist" are used. From the ratio, you can see where the reporting is coming from. If you never hear of people described as "liberal" but often hear people described as "conservative", then the bias of the reporter is far left, since to him/her no one is to their left. Conversely if no one is reported as "conservative" but many are described as "liberal" then you're reading National Review or NewsMax.
Keep these principles in mind as you watch, listen to, or read your news sources.
Miller & Urey's experiment was only run for a few days because when they let it go longer than that, the result was an unextractable brown goo. Only by running it for a short time was anything extractable. So letting it go for a longer period of time would provide less material for life, not more. Go ahead and run your experiment, and see what evolves from tar.
I note you attack Cremesti for not exhaustively footnoting, I agree that's a deficiency in his work which, if I knew him, I would point out to him. However my point in providing the link is to look at the simple science he does point out. Such as the half-lives of the prebiotic components.
Your attempt to use vast times and distances to rationalize how something improbable could happen would make sense, if it was less improbable that it is. If you look at just how like is it for one 450 residue protein to have just the correct chirality at all its chiral positions (leave off 8% as the average amount of glycine in a protein), you have 2^(450*.92) = 2^(414) = 10^124.
There have been only 10^18 seconds since the big bang (if you believe in that model). The universe is only 10^28 inches across or so. 10^124 is staggeringly larger than those numbers, so you're still stuck with impossible odds to just get the chirality right on just one protein. Never mind getting the amino acid sequences anywhere near correct, or folding it properly, or having it in an environment of proper salinity, pKa, temperature, dissolved gasses, etc.
I notice you attack Cremesti for "quotes...way out of context". Yet you did not address the science in his paper at all. In fact if you google for "cremesti" and "creationist" you will get ZERO hits. So your claim of his site being "a well known very biased creationist site" is, according to google, inaccurate.
And while perhaps you could stretch to say NH3 blocks UV light, it actually absorbs it and is dissociated by it. Personally I would not call that blocking. If I'm getting shot at, I want a barrier that blocks the bullets, not one destroyed by the bullets.
Of course CH4 is stable; it's entropically very happy. Four nice covalent SP3 bonds in a pretty tetrahedron. Yet add energy and it will dissociate, similarly to NH3 (which is very analogous even in its orbital hybridization characteristics).
If you check Miller's later work, you'll see he discusses the fact that the experiment had to be stopped after a few days, or the entire experiment just turned into unresolvable, unextractable brown goo.
Protocells are not an answer for abiogenesis; unless something can reproduce accurately, it cannot evolve. Without near-perfect replication, evolution cannot happen. Only when you have a tiny (not zero) amount of errors in replication can one generation inherit the beneficial mutation of the previous generation. Protocells have no replication control mechanism, budding of one to another is uncontrolled and will result in a random partitioning of the contents. This is not fodder for natural selection, as the "descendants" are unlike the "parents", and without natural selection, evolution is not in the picture. So protocells are no more useful in explaining abiogenesis than the Miller-Urey experiments.
I made specific reference to how it's treated in textbooks; that was the point. Current textbooks claim it [Miller-Urey] shows how abiogenesis occurred, it does nothing of the sort.
It's a nice hand wave to say
somehow life on Earth has evolved to use only one of those. It isn't hard to imagine that one or the other might have a slight advantage or even that life had to - at some early stage - chose just one and use it.
Yet you are attributing purpose to "life", as when you say "chose". Yet evolution is supposed to happen by random changes, not by direction.
And you point about creating organics is quite true, heat carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen under a bit of pressure and you'll get all kinds of things. But those are immersed in a toxic soup that would annihilate any peptide bonds.
Miller and Urey's experiment is highly misrepresented in the textbooks of today. Among other things, it was based on a completely bogus set of assumptions. Such as the atmosphere being C02, CH4, H20, NH3 with no free 02. At our distance from the sun, this atmosphere is absurd. Why? Because the hard UV that would be coming in without any ozone layer (no O2 in the atmosphere, no ozone layer) would dissociate the NH3 rapidly into N2 and H2, as it would CH4 into more complex oils. But if there were 02 in the atmosphere, their experiment would fail miserably as the oxygenation would be the dominant reaction. All of which makes their experimental conditions irrelevant.
Additionally, they only made a tiny fraction of the amino acids necessary for life. Those that were made were racemic, while life is universally homochiral in proteins (the tiny number of exceptions are in things like bacterial cell walls).
And the sludge they did produce was mostly tar (a term used by organic chemists to mean the sludge left behind when you can't extract anything useful from it). In fact it was 85% tar, 13.0% carboxylic acids (many of which would destroy life before it could get started), 1.05% glycine (the simplest amino acid) and 0.85% alanine (the second simplest amino acid). There were also trace amounts of glutamic, aspartic, valine, leucine, serine, proline, and treonine.
If you want to understand the problems with the chemistry of the origin of life, there's a good paper that's pretty readable for those with a bit of exposure to chemistry.
I'm a creationist, just to get labels out of the way. You seem to be arguing that creationism and science are mutually exclusive, and that evolutionists are purely empirical scientific machines (to put it absolutist terminology).
Problem with that is - where did matter come from? Where did physical laws come from? Where did F=ma come from? Show me the repeatable experiment that shows how pleochroic halos originated in a gradualistic, uniformitarian geology. Explain how proteins came to be purely homochiral. Show the origin of life in a repeatable experiment.
There are no explanations for those points. They can only be accepted on that nasty word, the F word, "FAITH". Yes, evolution takes at least as much faith as does creationism. Many evolutionists have said so themselves over the last century, I can provide you with lots of quotes if you'd like.
So please examine your core foundational beliefs and realize you're using at least as much faith as we creationists are. Then we can, if you are willing, discuss the scientific facts and what the possible and probable explanations are for the hard facts we have.
In 1971-73, I worked at Saint Barnabas which had the world's largest hyperbaric facility, made by Linde. They had two 12 foot in diameter, 45 foot long chambers side by side. Each cylinder had three sub-chambers. The front of each could go to 100 PSI relative (about 225 feet of salt water equivalent). The other two chambers in each could do IIRC 60 PSI relative, but were usually only cranked to 60 feet or about 33.7 PSI relative.
Then patients had an Oxygen mask put on, and by Henry's Law the amount of gas dissolving in the bloodstream is proportional to the amount of gas in the air in the lungs. So they had 100% oxygen at 3x surface pressure, or about 15x the usual amount of oxygen in the lungs. This meant that hemoglobin was temporarily unnecessary, as the dissolved oxygen in the blood was more significant than the amount carried by hemoglobin.
This led to some amazing things. Carbon Monoxide poisoning was cured nearly instantly. Stroke victims, paralyzed on one side of their body, were wheeled in to the chamber and walked out 90 minutes later. Once an entire kidney transplant under hyperbaric conditions was done (donor and recipient each in one cylinder), the amount of surgical shock incurred was vastly reduced.
Burn victims were helped immensely, as the hypoxia/edema cycle was eliminated. Gas Gangrene, an anaerobic infection (claustridium welchi I think), was rapidly treated using this with no drugs.
But the hospital eventually tore it out - it was unused by the doctors. There were over 600 doctors on staff, but only a couple ever used it. We guessed part of the problem was it wasn't advertised in JAMA, nor was it covered in med school as a topic. Whatever the reason, it is sadly not there any more.
It's very simple to explain... as the article says
While gravity holds things together at the local level (and by local I mean within galaxies and even between them, forming galactic clusters) some unknown force is working behind the scenes and across the universe to pull everything apart. Scientists have only come to realize this dark force in recent years, by discovering that the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing pace.
But the origin of that causative agent of the acceleration is obvious if you look:
Job 9:8 "[God] stretches out the heavens"
Psalm 104:2"stretching out heaven like a tent curtain"
Isaiah 40:22"He... stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent"
Isaiah 42:5 "Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out"
Isaiah 44:24"I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself."
Isaiah 45:12"It is I who made the earth and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands"
Isaiah 48:13"Surely My hand founded the earth and My right hand spread out the heavens."
Isaiah 51:13"the Lord your Maker, Who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth"
Jer 10:12 "He has stretched out the heavens"
Jer 51:15 "He stretched out the heavens"
Zech 12:1 "the Lord who stretches out the heavens"
Wow. Your response was the most intelligent, well thought out, and supremely courteous one I've ever gotten. I thank you and admire you for that.
I'll answer the point you made about how Dr. Humphreys deals with what is the meaning of "days" (Hebrew yom) in Genesis. It's really a very direct principle, that of using passages where the context makes the meaning clear to determine the true meaning of the word. And the Hebrew yom is much like the English "day". Both can have three meanings - an indeterminate period of time ("in my father's day"). They can also mean the period from sunrise to sunset ("you can see better as you drive during the day"). And they can mean a 24 hour period ("the team can deliver that code in 23 days").
So from that, doing a detailed analysis on everywhere in the Old Testament that the word "yom" appears, there are two significant findings. First, any time a number is used with the word, it means a 24-hour time period. Second, any time "evening and morning" is used, it also means a 24-hour time period.
In Genesis 1, "yom" is used with both a number (the second day) and the "evening and morning" modifiers. So there is double evidence that it does intend to mean a 24-hour period. It's from that point that 6-day creationists tend to take its meaning to be what it appears to be.
And indeed Dr. Humphreys may be way wrong about while holes. My scientific background leads me to hope that he's right about them, since it would be such a nice answer. He has other interesting theories as well; his paper about the decay of the magnetic field energy is one I find quite fascinating.
I fervently hope that your openness to the truth will lead you to find it.
Your post is wonderful at describing and detailing the logic and flow of argument. Thanks for providing that clear explanation for those who are challenged in that arena.
None of us were around when the earth was formed, whether it be supernaturally or by an accretion disk or some other method. Therefore we must either infer or deduce to arrive at a belief of what happened. Since no reproducible experiment can absolutely tell us what happened in the past, there is no hard empirical proof. So we must make assumptions in order to arrive at a belief system, whether it be Biblical or the current scientific beliefs (and there are more than one of those).
One of the key assumptions for me as a creationist is that God does not lie, and if He says He made the universe in six days, then we (at least I) take Him at His word. A key assumption for most astrophysicists and astronomers is that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, that the earth was never inside the event horizon of a white hole, and that things are now as they have always been. In other words, that conditions are constant and that therefore tests made today will work the same tomorrow.
Did you notice that bit I threw in there about inside the event horizon of a white hole? If that did occur, it is absolutely possible for the earth to be formed in days while billions of years passed in the stars, due to time effects at the event horizon. This allows starlight to travel at current light speed to the earth and be visible even though the earth is relatively young. This "white hole cosmology" is a brilliant work by Dr. Russ Humphreys, a Ph.D. physicist at Sandia National labs. If you're interested shoot me an email and I'll send you more info.
You assert that the skulls had not previously been dated. From the article:
The "Peñon Woman III" -- which scientists believe is now the oldest skull from the New World -- has been sitting in Mexico City's National Museum of Anthropology since 1959. At the insistence of geologist Silvia Gonzalez, who had a hunch that the bones were older than previously thought...
So it was somehow dated, by visual guesswork or by C14 is not specified in the article.
And since there is a sordid history with dating being revised based on researchers' desires to see dates consistent with their pet theories (KBS tuff mean anything to you?), it's relevant to raise the question here.
You also mentioned (in your previous post) that C14 levels have been rising due to (your opinion) nuclear testing or (my opinion) the equilibrium level not yet having been reached. To do a quick calibration of your explanation, look at the rate of atmospheric nuclear testing by decade. From 1946-1962, the US set off 193 atmospheric nukes. From 1949 to 1962, the Soviets set off 142. After the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), negotiations started on a test ban treaty. On July 25, 1963 atmospheric testing was banned by a treaty between the USSR and the USA. So if the amount of C14 has been increasing throughout that time period, it's not from atmospheric nuke testing. The figure I gave was that the C14 level has been steadily increasing for 40 years, during which an atmospheric nuclear test ban has been in effect. The Chinese setting off a few does not compare to the Bikini Atoll being destroyed by the US or the Steppes being made to glow by the Soviets. You'll need another explanation for the steady increase of C14 that has been observed.
And how do you know what every moment of the last 17000 years (the time frame claimed to be the age of the skull under discussion) did? Was there enough water soaking for a few hundred years to alter the ratios of C14 in it? Was it ever exposed to the atmosphere during that time? That sample sat in a museum display case for 43 years prior to being re-tested. The article is silent on whether corrections were made to deal with that time of atmospheric (or whatever gas was inside the display case) exposure. Were the meticulous sample preparation steps you speak of followed assiduously that entire time? Which of the dating tests was correct, the test in 1959 when it was found, or the one now when it brought fame to the testers?
The article fails to mention the many problems with Carbon-14 dating. In fact it is very questionable, there are a number of known absurd results in the literature. Furthermore, testing shows there is more C14 in the atmosphere now than there was 40 years ago; if the amount of C14 is increasing, then dating based on assumed constant levels is going to give much too old results. Only if you can prove that it's been constant can dating be considered reliable using this technique.
Some examples of wildly wrong results from C14 dating:
Shells from snails that were alive were carbon dated: 27,000 years old. Science vol. 224, 1984, pp. 58-61
Similarly, live mollusk shells: up to 2300 years old. Science vol. 141, 1963, pp.634-637
"One part of the Vollosovitch mammoth carbon dated at 29,500 years and another part at 44,000" --Troy L. Pewe, Quaternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862 (U.S. Gov. printing office, 1975) p. 30.
"One part of Dima [a baby frozen mammoth] was 40,000, another part was 26,000" --Troy L. Pewe, Quaternary Stratigraphic Nomenclature in Unglaciated Central Alaska, Geological Survey Professional Paper 862 (U.S. Gov. printing office, 1975) p. 30
Hip dysplasia actually became common in the US in the 1930's. Yet it was quite rare in Australia until the 1970's and 1980's. That's not evidence for a genetic issue, but it does correlate quite effectively with when commercial (cooked, processed, etc.) dog foods came on the scene.
If you feed your dog the BARF (Bones And Raw Food) diet, odds are they'll be a ton healthier. Research has shown that dogs from lines raised on the BARF diet tend to have near-zero incidence of dysplasia when their litters also use the BARF diet (see the books on the above site for details).
Many breeders are coming to realize this - the problem is primarily intake not primarily genetics. This has been quite effective for our giant-breed dog, a Great Pyrenees. He's over 11 years old and still quite spry, without a trace of dysplasia.
Can you read the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 and still think there is a chance to accept Jesus after death? Your attempts to inject a gap in these places is an "argument from silence". That is, you're arguing that because A is not said that A is true. By that same argument, since Darwin did not specifically deny that all creatures came from nuclear fusion explosions in the ionosphere, Darwin's theory can be taken to mean that nuclear fusion is the root of all life. Your attempt to put a gap in is like those who want to put a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. There is no basis for it, and arguing from silence is an insufficient methodology.
Your interpretation is, well, in my opinion as wrong as it can get. Read 1st Corinthians and you'll get the idea, Romans would help you as well. There are not individual verses that close the loophole in the nice neat sound-bite fashion popular today, but the books as a whole make mincemeat of that heretical concept.
And then consider from the book of Matthew, chapter 7, particularly verse 23:
21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? 23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. 24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: 25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. 26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: 27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Is if you know where you're going to spend eternity. There's only one way to do that.
Religions in this world fall in two categories:
1) You only get to heaven/paradise by doing enough good works to earn it;
or
2) Accept the free gift of salvation from Jesus Christ by admitting you (like every other person here today) are a sinner, and that you need the power of Jesus.
With that hope, dying isn't as big a deal.
Note to those who are unaware: category (1) includes Televangelists, Catholicism, Hinduism, Mormonism, and most Protestant denominations. Since they teach "works" salvation, they are not teaching what the Bible teaches.
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If you run a double-blind test in medicine and prove something is completely ineffective, the medication never sees the market (well, that's how it's supposed to work; thalidomide and other examples indicate that even that process is not without tragic flaws).
Similarly tests run using rocks of known ages produce results for geologists (not just for creationists) that show the methodology is wrong. Whatever the reason, if a method is flawed, it needs to be either fixed or discarded.
One of the most vocal anti-creationist geologists around is G. Brent Dalrymple. He testified against Gentry in the court case about teaching evolution a few years ago, and has written extensively against creationism. Yet his article (Dalrymple, G. B., 1969. 40Ar/36Ar analyses of historic lava flows. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 6:47-55) showed five cases of known date rocks producing results that (my conclusion, not his) should disqualify radiometric dating as it is currently practiced.
Hualalai basalt (Hawaii, AD 1800-1801) 1.6 ± 0.16 Ma, 1.41 ± 0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt (Sicily, 122 BC) 0.25 ± 0.08 Ma
Mt. Etna basalt (Sicily, AD 1792) 0.35 ± 0.14 Ma
Mt. Lassen plagioclase (California, AD 1915) 0.11 ± 0.3 Ma
Sunset Crater basalt (Arizona, AD 1064-1065) 0.27 ± 0.09 Ma, 0.25 ± 0.15 Ma
What justification can there be for continuing to use a method known to be wrong? Aside from preserving the jobs and income of those whose livelihood depends on maintaining the intellectual status quo, none occurs to me - anybody out there got a less uncharitable idea?
So why are they considered to be 325000 to 385000 years old? From volcanic dating. Now how accurate is volcanic dating. That's where this gets interesting. Evolutionists hate to have this brought up, but Steve Austin, a geologist with a PhD from Penn State, did an interesting test a while ago. He picked up some rocks inside the crater of Mt. St. Helens from the lava dome. These rocks were definitely formed less than ten years before he picked them up. He sent them to be radiometrically dated, and the results of K-Ar dating of one "whole rock" sample was 345000 to 355000 years. Another was 334000 to 346000.
So what we have here is two known-age (less than ten years) rocks were given dates comparable to the footprint rocks. What scientific basis is there for believing the footprints are any more accurately dated than the known-age rocks? None, since there is no known-age rock from thousands or millions of years ago, no one put one in a time vault with a label on it.
The standard answer by evolutionists and long-age defenders to this set of facts is that Steve Austin is incompetent (note they include no references from his PhD committee defending that point of view) and that he made mistakes selecting the rocks. Even if that were the case, the same mistakes could have been made in the footprint rock selections, yet since the dates come out to be in the same range, no one would think twice about questioning the methodology involved.
Bottom line: science is about doing repeatable experiments to determine things. Radiometric dating is not science, since given known-age rocks, the best labs around return wildly wrong results. If a supposedly scientific method produces known false results, it's not scientific and should be rejected.
Timex appealed to the government to block digital watch imports. When they lost, they decided to compete instead of complain, and have done very well since. But most times the entrenched old guard is displaced, which is why they fight so hard to keep the riffraff out.
The point here is simple: there is a tyranny of the status quo. Look at Microsoft - they are not trivial to displace from a monopolistic position; neither are corporations and universities that have a vested interest in gradual instead of rapid, massive change.
Gradualism is always more accepted by the powers that be than revolution. Remember the old adage: evolution not revolution. That's what the powers in place want to see, they do not want to see something that will displace them. And when they hold the power, they will act in their own interest the vast majority of the time. If a Star-Trek transporter were invented, imagine how the airlines and automobile manufacturers would fight it and would fund studies showing how dangerous or energy inefficient it was. Their survival would be at stake, and they'd fight to stay around. Yet their vigor in fighting would not be indicative of whether transporters were useful.
Just a little bit of time with Google and you'll find the most likely answer is it could never have been the Christians, as it was gone before 20 B.C., and since Christ was born around 4 B.C., well, it's obviously not the Christians nor is it the muslims, since they were later in history than the Christians.
For a good summary, see here. Basically Plutarch and Livy both wrote that Caesar was responsible, and they wrote long before the Catholic destruction in 391 of the satellite library.
If you read all of Ezekiel 4, you can see that God was assigning Ezekiel a surrogate punishment for the transgressions of Israel. This is just like using Numbers 16 to say a day is a year; forcing that interpretation on the rest of the Bible is ignoring the specific context that each passage contains. If you're going to engage in doing that, then you have to deal with Peter who says in 2Peter 3:8 "But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day."
Neither interpretation (a day is a year or a day is a thousand years) should be used outside its context.
For further details of why this should not be used, see this previous post.
Fine, then go do it historically based on 1993-1995 when the Democrats last held all the branches of government.
You raise some excellent points. One of the strongest ways to prove the liberal bias is by applying the principles you set out.
Take a mass media news entity over a time span of a month - Newsweek, Time, CNN, CBS, etc. Note the number of times someone is referred to as "conservative", "right-wing", or "jewish/christian". Then compare that with the number of times the balancing words of "liberal", "left-wing", or "humanist/atheist" are used. From the ratio, you can see where the reporting is coming from. If you never hear of people described as "liberal" but often hear people described as "conservative", then the bias of the reporter is far left, since to him/her no one is to their left. Conversely if no one is reported as "conservative" but many are described as "liberal" then you're reading National Review or NewsMax.
Keep these principles in mind as you watch, listen to, or read your news sources.
Miller & Urey's experiment was only run for a few days because when they let it go longer than that, the result was an unextractable brown goo. Only by running it for a short time was anything extractable. So letting it go for a longer period of time would provide less material for life, not more. Go ahead and run your experiment, and see what evolves from tar.
I note you attack Cremesti for not exhaustively footnoting, I agree that's a deficiency in his work which, if I knew him, I would point out to him. However my point in providing the link is to look at the simple science he does point out. Such as the half-lives of the prebiotic components.
Your attempt to use vast times and distances to rationalize how something improbable could happen would make sense, if it was less improbable that it is. If you look at just how like is it for one 450 residue protein to have just the correct chirality at all its chiral positions (leave off 8% as the average amount of glycine in a protein), you have 2^(450*.92) = 2^(414) = 10^124.
There have been only 10^18 seconds since the big bang (if you believe in that model). The universe is only 10^28 inches across or so. 10^124 is staggeringly larger than those numbers, so you're still stuck with impossible odds to just get the chirality right on just one protein. Never mind getting the amino acid sequences anywhere near correct, or folding it properly, or having it in an environment of proper salinity, pKa, temperature, dissolved gasses, etc.
I notice you attack Cremesti for "quotes...way out of context". Yet you did not address the science in his paper at all. In fact if you google for "cremesti" and "creationist" you will get ZERO hits. So your claim of his site being "a well known very biased creationist site" is, according to google, inaccurate.
And while perhaps you could stretch to say NH3 blocks UV light, it actually absorbs it and is dissociated by it. Personally I would not call that blocking. If I'm getting shot at, I want a barrier that blocks the bullets, not one destroyed by the bullets.
Of course CH4 is stable; it's entropically very happy. Four nice covalent SP3 bonds in a pretty tetrahedron. Yet add energy and it will dissociate, similarly to NH3 (which is very analogous even in its orbital hybridization characteristics).
If you check Miller's later work, you'll see he discusses the fact that the experiment had to be stopped after a few days, or the entire experiment just turned into unresolvable, unextractable brown goo.
Protocells are not an answer for abiogenesis; unless something can reproduce accurately, it cannot evolve. Without near-perfect replication, evolution cannot happen. Only when you have a tiny (not zero) amount of errors in replication can one generation inherit the beneficial mutation of the previous generation. Protocells have no replication control mechanism, budding of one to another is uncontrolled and will result in a random partitioning of the contents. This is not fodder for natural selection, as the "descendants" are unlike the "parents", and without natural selection, evolution is not in the picture. So protocells are no more useful in explaining abiogenesis than the Miller-Urey experiments.
It's a nice hand wave to sayYet you are attributing purpose to "life", as when you say "chose". Yet evolution is supposed to happen by random changes, not by direction.
And you point about creating organics is quite true, heat carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen under a bit of pressure and you'll get all kinds of things. But those are immersed in a toxic soup that would annihilate any peptide bonds.
Miller and Urey's experiment is highly misrepresented in the textbooks of today. Among other things, it was based on a completely bogus set of assumptions. Such as the atmosphere being C02, CH4, H20, NH3 with no free 02. At our distance from the sun, this atmosphere is absurd. Why? Because the hard UV that would be coming in without any ozone layer (no O2 in the atmosphere, no ozone layer) would dissociate the NH3 rapidly into N2 and H2, as it would CH4 into more complex oils. But if there were 02 in the atmosphere, their experiment would fail miserably as the oxygenation would be the dominant reaction. All of which makes their experimental conditions irrelevant.
Additionally, they only made a tiny fraction of the amino acids necessary for life. Those that were made were racemic, while life is universally homochiral in proteins (the tiny number of exceptions are in things like bacterial cell walls).
And the sludge they did produce was mostly tar (a term used by organic chemists to mean the sludge left behind when you can't extract anything useful from it). In fact it was 85% tar, 13.0% carboxylic acids (many of which would destroy life before it could get started), 1.05% glycine (the simplest amino acid) and 0.85% alanine (the second simplest amino acid). There were also trace amounts of glutamic, aspartic, valine, leucine, serine, proline, and treonine.
If you want to understand the problems with the chemistry of the origin of life, there's a good paper that's pretty readable for those with a bit of exposure to chemistry.
I'm a creationist, just to get labels out of the way. You seem to be arguing that creationism and science are mutually exclusive, and that evolutionists are purely empirical scientific machines (to put it absolutist terminology).
Problem with that is - where did matter come from? Where did physical laws come from? Where did F=ma come from? Show me the repeatable experiment that shows how pleochroic halos originated in a gradualistic, uniformitarian geology. Explain how proteins came to be purely homochiral. Show the origin of life in a repeatable experiment.
There are no explanations for those points. They can only be accepted on that nasty word, the F word, "FAITH". Yes, evolution takes at least as much faith as does creationism. Many evolutionists have said so themselves over the last century, I can provide you with lots of quotes if you'd like.
So please examine your core foundational beliefs and realize you're using at least as much faith as we creationists are. Then we can, if you are willing, discuss the scientific facts and what the possible and probable explanations are for the hard facts we have.
In 1971-73, I worked at Saint Barnabas which had the world's largest hyperbaric facility, made by Linde. They had two 12 foot in diameter, 45 foot long chambers side by side. Each cylinder had three sub-chambers. The front of each could go to 100 PSI relative (about 225 feet of salt water equivalent). The other two chambers in each could do IIRC 60 PSI relative, but were usually only cranked to 60 feet or about 33.7 PSI relative.
Then patients had an Oxygen mask put on, and by Henry's Law the amount of gas dissolving in the bloodstream is proportional to the amount of gas in the air in the lungs. So they had 100% oxygen at 3x surface pressure, or about 15x the usual amount of oxygen in the lungs. This meant that hemoglobin was temporarily unnecessary, as the dissolved oxygen in the blood was more significant than the amount carried by hemoglobin.
This led to some amazing things. Carbon Monoxide poisoning was cured nearly instantly. Stroke victims, paralyzed on one side of their body, were wheeled in to the chamber and walked out 90 minutes later. Once an entire kidney transplant under hyperbaric conditions was done (donor and recipient each in one cylinder), the amount of surgical shock incurred was vastly reduced.
Burn victims were helped immensely, as the hypoxia/edema cycle was eliminated. Gas Gangrene, an anaerobic infection (claustridium welchi I think), was rapidly treated using this with no drugs.
But the hospital eventually tore it out - it was unused by the doctors. There were over 600 doctors on staff, but only a couple ever used it. We guessed part of the problem was it wasn't advertised in JAMA, nor was it covered in med school as a topic. Whatever the reason, it is sadly not there any more.
Job 9:8 "[God] stretches out the heavens"
Psalm 104:2"stretching out heaven like a tent curtain"
Isaiah 40:22"He
Isaiah 42:5 "Thus says God the Lord, who created the heavens and stretched them out"
Isaiah 44:24"I, the Lord, am the maker of all things, stretching out the heavens by Myself."
Isaiah 45:12"It is I who made the earth and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands"
Isaiah 48:13"Surely My hand founded the earth and My right hand spread out the heavens."
Isaiah 51:13"the Lord your Maker, Who stretched out the heavens and laid the foundations of the earth"
Jer 10:12 "He has stretched out the heavens"
Jer 51:15 "He stretched out the heavens"
Zech 12:1 "the Lord who stretches out the heavens"
Wow. Your response was the most intelligent, well thought out, and supremely courteous one I've ever gotten. I thank you and admire you for that.
I'll answer the point you made about how Dr. Humphreys deals with what is the meaning of "days" (Hebrew yom) in Genesis. It's really a very direct principle, that of using passages where the context makes the meaning clear to determine the true meaning of the word. And the Hebrew yom is much like the English "day". Both can have three meanings - an indeterminate period of time ("in my father's day"). They can also mean the period from sunrise to sunset ("you can see better as you drive during the day"). And they can mean a 24 hour period ("the team can deliver that code in 23 days").
So from that, doing a detailed analysis on everywhere in the Old Testament that the word "yom" appears, there are two significant findings. First, any time a number is used with the word, it means a 24-hour time period. Second, any time "evening and morning" is used, it also means a 24-hour time period.
In Genesis 1, "yom" is used with both a number (the second day) and the "evening and morning" modifiers. So there is double evidence that it does intend to mean a 24-hour period. It's from that point that 6-day creationists tend to take its meaning to be what it appears to be.
And indeed Dr. Humphreys may be way wrong about while holes. My scientific background leads me to hope that he's right about them, since it would be such a nice answer. He has other interesting theories as well; his paper about the decay of the magnetic field energy is one I find quite fascinating.
I fervently hope that your openness to the truth will lead you to find it.
Your post is wonderful at describing and detailing the logic and flow of argument. Thanks for providing that clear explanation for those who are challenged in that arena.
None of us were around when the earth was formed, whether it be supernaturally or by an accretion disk or some other method. Therefore we must either infer or deduce to arrive at a belief of what happened. Since no reproducible experiment can absolutely tell us what happened in the past, there is no hard empirical proof. So we must make assumptions in order to arrive at a belief system, whether it be Biblical or the current scientific beliefs (and there are more than one of those).
One of the key assumptions for me as a creationist is that God does not lie, and if He says He made the universe in six days, then we (at least I) take Him at His word. A key assumption for most astrophysicists and astronomers is that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, that the earth was never inside the event horizon of a white hole, and that things are now as they have always been. In other words, that conditions are constant and that therefore tests made today will work the same tomorrow.
Did you notice that bit I threw in there about inside the event horizon of a white hole? If that did occur, it is absolutely possible for the earth to be formed in days while billions of years passed in the stars, due to time effects at the event horizon. This allows starlight to travel at current light speed to the earth and be visible even though the earth is relatively young. This "white hole cosmology" is a brilliant work by Dr. Russ Humphreys, a Ph.D. physicist at Sandia National labs. If you're interested shoot me an email and I'll send you more info.
And since there is a sordid history with dating being revised based on researchers' desires to see dates consistent with their pet theories (KBS tuff mean anything to you?), it's relevant to raise the question here.
You also mentioned (in your previous post) that C14 levels have been rising due to (your opinion) nuclear testing or (my opinion) the equilibrium level not yet having been reached. To do a quick calibration of your explanation, look at the rate of atmospheric nuclear testing by decade. From 1946-1962, the US set off 193 atmospheric nukes. From 1949 to 1962, the Soviets set off 142. After the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962), negotiations started on a test ban treaty. On July 25, 1963 atmospheric testing was banned by a treaty between the USSR and the USA. So if the amount of C14 has been increasing throughout that time period, it's not from atmospheric nuke testing. The figure I gave was that the C14 level has been steadily increasing for 40 years, during which an atmospheric nuclear test ban has been in effect. The Chinese setting off a few does not compare to the Bikini Atoll being destroyed by the US or the Steppes being made to glow by the Soviets. You'll need another explanation for the steady increase of C14 that has been observed.
And how do you know what every moment of the last 17000 years (the time frame claimed to be the age of the skull under discussion) did? Was there enough water soaking for a few hundred years to alter the ratios of C14 in it? Was it ever exposed to the atmosphere during that time? That sample sat in a museum display case for 43 years prior to being re-tested. The article is silent on whether corrections were made to deal with that time of atmospheric (or whatever gas was inside the display case) exposure. Were the meticulous sample preparation steps you speak of followed assiduously that entire time? Which of the dating tests was correct, the test in 1959 when it was found, or the one now when it brought fame to the testers?
Some examples of wildly wrong results from C14 dating:
Hip dysplasia actually became common in the US in the 1930's. Yet it was quite rare in Australia until the 1970's and 1980's. That's not evidence for a genetic issue, but it does correlate quite effectively with when commercial (cooked, processed, etc.) dog foods came on the scene.
If you feed your dog the BARF (Bones And Raw Food) diet, odds are they'll be a ton healthier. Research has shown that dogs from lines raised on the BARF diet tend to have near-zero incidence of dysplasia when their litters also use the BARF diet (see the books on the above site for details).
Many breeders are coming to realize this - the problem is primarily intake not primarily genetics. This has been quite effective for our giant-breed dog, a Great Pyrenees. He's over 11 years old and still quite spry, without a trace of dysplasia.
Can you read the story of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16 and still think there is a chance to accept Jesus after death? Your attempts to inject a gap in these places is an "argument from silence". That is, you're arguing that because A is not said that A is true. By that same argument, since Darwin did not specifically deny that all creatures came from nuclear fusion explosions in the ionosphere, Darwin's theory can be taken to mean that nuclear fusion is the root of all life. Your attempt to put a gap in is like those who want to put a gap between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. There is no basis for it, and arguing from silence is an insufficient methodology.
Your interpretation is, well, in my opinion as wrong as it can get. Read 1st Corinthians and you'll get the idea, Romans would help you as well. There are not individual verses that close the loophole in the nice neat sound-bite fashion popular today, but the books as a whole make mincemeat of that heretical concept.
And then consider from the book of Matthew, chapter 7, particularly verse 23:
21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.
22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?
23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.
24 Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock:
25 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock.
26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand:
27 And the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of it.
Is if you know where you're going to spend eternity. There's only one way to do that.
Religions in this world fall in two categories:
1) You only get to heaven/paradise by doing enough good works to earn it;
or
2) Accept the free gift of salvation from Jesus Christ by admitting you (like every other person here today) are a sinner, and that you need the power of Jesus.
With that hope, dying isn't as big a deal.
Note to those who are unaware: category (1) includes Televangelists, Catholicism, Hinduism, Mormonism, and most Protestant denominations. Since they teach "works" salvation, they are not teaching what the Bible teaches.
Oops the link didn't make it in there, here it is