Carbon-14 gives of radiation which is poisonous
Actually I did some research it's more likely that people lived longer because bacteria and viruses hadn't mutated yet.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 26 2011, 8:59 pm by K_A.

I'm not dodging this topic, just been puking up black all day. I'll be responding during the upcoming week assuming I don't die.

I'll pray for you

C14's half life is like 5k+ years, so how can it be poisonous?
Also, there are more to mutations than radiation
Also, bacteria can exchange genes by conjugation

Don't waste your time, god has a plan for me, remember?

I got this from here.
Biological activities accelerate the decay rate of radioactive isotopes.
The biological half life of Carbon-14 is 12 days according to this.
I'm not sure exactly why that is, but it does happen.
This is also likely to affect the readings of carbon-14 dating by A TON.
I'm not sure which biological processes affect the half life of C-14, but I do know that many bodily functions continue after a person dies i.e. hair growing.
12 days could be the difference between getting a reading of 11460 years and 5730 years.

I assume you mistook exchange of carbon with the environment for radioactive decay.

God is capitalized. His plan obviously involves me praying for you.
If you get better within 24 hours will you convert on the spot?


Raitaki it doesn't matter if the C-14 hasn't literally gone through a half life, All that matters is that it is no longer in the remains of the specimen.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 26 2011, 10:10 pm by K_A.

Which means that the specimen has been dead for so long all the carbon decayed away. Since there's no reliable evidence proving that carbon-14 isn't around in the atmosphere until recently.

Sure there is. They prove it just the same way as they prove CO2 concentrations in the air up to 200,000 years ago. Primarily by examining trapped air bubbles in ice cores from Antartica, Greenland and other permanent glaciers from around the world (some in Africa and some in Europe).

So yeah, actually they do know how much carbon there was in the air x years ago. Carbon dating itself only works up to about 60,000 years ago, so there's no problem with not having first hand evidence of what the atmosphere was at that time, because as I said above the ice cores reliably go back about 200,000 years.

Verifying that carbon dating is accurate by correlating between different measurement systems where possible. You look at multiple pieces of evidence in an area where you have multiple pieces to estimate date, and say you come up with a date of 35,000 years, with each individual piece of evidence having it's own indicator and error-bars. Then when you examine some other site where only a single piece of evidence is readily available/high enough quality, you can estimate it's age based on what you learnt about that indicator and it's error-bars from the first site. If the indicator we're talking about is carbon dating, then you work out a method from the first site and use it at the second site to say how old the second site is. Then, as we're particularly talking about fossils, you find multiple examples of the same fossils in many different places, do carbon dating on all of them and see if your results are widely all over the place, or mainly grouped together.

Also the fact that carbon 14 has significantly faster decay rate in a biological context is irrelevant. Carbon dating works by the animal or plant taking in fresh C14 from the atmosphere. When it dies, this process stops, as does the faster decay rate, and the remaining carbon 14 has a half life of 5730 years.

Wait, how do they know how old the ice cores are?

Using the awesome power of geology, which you very much detest (for its contributions against the bible).

Aye? I don't detest geology. Stop with the strawmanology. Also, I wanted details on that awesome power.

Pretty easy to look this stuff up, you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core

In short: like tree rings, ice cores have layers that correspond to years. You can count the layers and therefore know how many years have passed. At the very bottom of cores, because of the immense pressure, the layers squish together so you can't be sure exactly what year a particular sample represents, but you still know within the series roughly where it is (eg 2 inches might be approx 20 years, so you can estimate the age of the sample).

Some of these cores are kilometres long. The wiki page makes reference to an individual core that goes back 420,000 years, and another that goes back 800,000 years.

I guess God just did all that to confuse us though (what a jerk), 'cause everyone knows the earth is only 6000 years old.

http://carm.org/secular-movements/creation-evolution-debate/ice-core-dating what Helen there said argues my case better than I ever could. Both the Biblical history and the oldearth theory explain how the ice cores are the way they are. The question is, which theory is correct? I don't see how either can be currently disproved, so you may choose to believe one and use that to validate evolution, while I shall choose the other to disprove evolution.

End of thread mebbe? I dunno, getting bored of this discussion anyway.

This response essentially sums up Helen's poisition:

What Helen has done, is taken the ice core data, her world view (that the bible is correct) and tried to explain the ice core data based on her world view. She makes up any and all possible explanations as required to show that the ice core data doesn't contradict her view.

That is not how science works. Science takes the evidence, and tries to come up with the most likely explanation for why the evidence is the way it is. The best explanations will have facets that can be tested - either by taking the same general model to other examples and see if those examples fit the model, or by predicting how the outcome of events that have not yet been witnessed will occur.

It seems to me that you are saying that science has decided that evolution is the correct answer, and so now is interpreting evidence to support the theory. In much the same way that Helen has decided that creationism and the bible is the correct answer, and so now is interpreting evidence to support that theory.

But science DOES NOT do that. So saying "science says this, religion says that, I choose religion" is really comparing apples to oranges. To sum it up in the same terms, science has *established* this, while religion *says* that. If religion and science were using the same "take a position, then argue the evidence to fit your position" methodology, then sure, there'd be no reason to choose science over religion, and probably choosing religion would make more sense. But science fundamentally does not work in that fashion. I think that is a trap that a lot of christians trying to argue against science fall into, thinking that science is really no more arbitrary than their beloved bible, and since both ways of explaining the world appear to have the same logic behind them, they'll take the bible's view.

The methodology that science follows is completely at odds with the methodology that religion uses. History has shown that as scientific data becomes more and more difficult to argue against, religion capitulates and cedes ground, trying to find the next bastion that science is required to attack and explain. This is obvious in my story of Copernicus above - now the church readily acknowledges that we live in a heliocentric universe, but it didn't used to. Similarly with evolution, religious people have accepted that actually natural selection exists on a small scale, but they don't believe in speciation.

Allow me to hypothesize if God existed. And by definition, God is omnipotent.Even if the biblical figures understood him, there would probably no words that would quite explain what he is like. Only that they did put it into words, and they were presumably mutated throughout the ages- and while it was in transfer(conversion, I can't quite put it into words) to the European worlds, the Biblical knowledge was explained through Aristotelian worldview (where all the unscientific explanations began popping out.)
In essence, the worldview Bible gets from is from a paradigm of social beliefs. If you chose to explain it with current theories, then you would probably get intelligent design. The thing is, Science also does not directly hypothesize whether or not Bible is wrong. It would obviously conflict with worldviews the Bible had with previous paradigms, that is because the paradigms of modern world are obviously faster than the paradigms of Bible. In the case of Young earth believers, their paradigm is probably 'very old'.

Nevertheless, I don't see why Evolution has to be the bane of creationism either. Since God by definition is omnipotent, he doesn't have to. He could still technically have 'created everything', even the timelines themselves. This is also the reason why there is no point in arguing whether or not God exists through scientific argument. Again I stress, we do not know, we cannot know, we will not know. But obviously, we can and will know what our five senses plus a few technologically aided senses will tell us what our world is.

But obviously, in the case of whether or not Evolution is 'wrong' is another case. The only speculation that is to be true if there were no intelligent designs involved is that Earth had beginning some 480 million years ago. At about 380 million years ago, life started as simple celled life. Through that current age. You can only explain that everything came from 'those' cells. Certainly did change. There are about a thousand theories to how they did change. The macro evolution is still highly mysterious. We can only write novels about that.

But certainly, Science is susceptible to paradigms also. As is with all that involves men.

@lanth both the theory that the world is old and had large amounts of regular ice layering to make large ice cores, AND the theory that the world is (relatively) young and had two ice ages which deposited large amounts of ice, followed by more regular ice layering to make large ice cores are scientifically acceptable. Secular scientists have chosen the one that fits their world view, and Christian scientists have chosen the one that fits their world view. Because neither can be proved, nor currently disproved, and because they are both scientifically plausible, you cannot truthfully say that the scientific view that happens to agree with a particular religious book's history is any less scientific than the one that happens to agree with an old earth worldview.

I would suggest that the theory that 2 ice ages deposited that much ice that quickly is completely outside of bounds of what all other science shows the historical climate to be like. As in, you don't just need "two ice ages", but you need two ice ages that were so cold and laid down so much ice in such a short period of time that they were, essentially, miracles. This would contradict all other scientific evidence as well (if it didn't, the other scientific evidence would already agree that there were two amazing ice ages).

Basically to contradict any specific claim that science is making, you have to throw out all other supporting scientific evidence that science uses to make that claim. Which really means you're saying that science explains absolutely nothing about the world.

It really isn't the case that science has looked at 4 pieces of evidence and so come to conclude that theory X explains them. It's a case that science has 10,000 different pieces of evidence, some of which has to be seriously teased out and studied thoroughly to understand it, and the only way to possibly explain all of them at the same time is with theories X, Y and Z. If you're saying that theory X is wrong, you need to come up with reasonable, plausible alternatives for all 10,000 of those pieces of evidence, not just 4.

I feel that many people have tried to use science to disprove the bible while everything that happens in it is scientifically possible. The fact is that if God made the world the way it is then everything in the Bible is Plausible. God made science, why wouldn't it be. Somehow it all manages to fit together with science and yet people refuse to believe it because they want to make their own version. It's easy to believe in a world without God because there is simply no physical evidence. For all we know God could have made the world it is just to test your faith O.o

In a world created by God mirracles can happen. If God put solid evidence of his existence in place there would be no reason for faith.