Age Correlations and an Old Earth

Do you suppose you could stop repeating claims that we've refuted? What with that being against the forum guidelines, and all. It would be better for you to support your claims rather than avoid the discussion and claim victory. You'd look a lot less like a crank.

Do you understand evolution well enough to know what a transitional form would be? Somehow, I doubt it. If you like you can open a thread, but there's more than enough transitional forms to convince anybody that hasn't already made an ideological committment not to believe in evolution.

Based on what rationale? If the number is arbitrary, then why did several independant examinations all return the same date?Why pick 4.6 billion if any big number will do? What do you propose is so significant about this number that leads us to always come back to it?

I don't find it so. Discarding measurements because of serious inconsistency with the majority of measurements is how measuring is done. If the dating was bogus, the dates would be all over the map.What we find instead is that the vast, vast majority of dating results converge on the same date, but there's the occasional really outlandish result. That's not the pattern we would expect if dating was fundamentally flawed. If that was true, we would expect dates to be random, not convergent. If anything, we need a few billion more. It's staggering the level of change we have to cram into only 4.6 billion years. But do we expand our dates as a result? No, because the dates aren't driven by evolutionary need; they're driven by geologic data. We'll stick with what the rocks say, which is 4.6 billion years. As much as we could use a few billion more, that's not how it works. What? Sure they do.But those dates are few and far between, and are always due to procedural error. That doesn't answer my question. Why this number, and not another?Who settled? Who decided? Show me the memo. No, like I said, we could use a few more billion years, just to be safe. There's an awful lot of biological change to cram into only 4.6 billion years. It's almost not enough. I don't understand what you mean. Are you asking for results from a laboratory where no scientist was involved with the work? You think the lab can just operate by itself, or something? I'm pleased you think so; I truly wish I could say the same for you. But you don't evidence honesty and truth in your posts. You evidence semantic games, out-of-context quote mining, and ad-hoc dismissals of your opponents because they lack some fictional "godsense."

So, you were lying? Your complimentary front was merely a ploy to seem justified in a backhand attack when you know that your own behavior meant I couldn't, in honesty, reciprocate?You've just provided another example of the behavior I was talking about. You've never been interested in serious debate, only in name-calling. Hrm, I'd really hoped to strike a note of pity. I'll have to work on that. But to suggest "anger" would mean that I give you considerably more thought than I really do.Please, don't flatter yourself. So, you don't believe your bathroom scale or your car speedometer, because their measurements are validated by convergence with other methods?I don't really find your criticism "stinging", I find it impotent and inconsistent. You trust (presumably) your speedometer and your bathroom scale, even though they're validated by the same methods you described as "circular." Oh, shit, I'm convinced! (Hrm, what does that do to your theory? Now that I'm convinced God-sense exists, but I don't have it? Bit of a paradox, isn't it?)

What other method is distinguishable from making shit up? Not theology.

Not to continue this off-topic diversion, but Stephen Hawking believes in God. He's famous for saying that the goal of his work is to "know the mind of God." Why would he be interested in the mind of something he doesn't believe in?

Do you believe that it is possible to come to an interpretation about the evidence that has nothing to do with Genesis? Say, for instance, the scientist was from a culture that was not Christian and had little or no knowledge of the book of Genesis?

Ok. Do you feel that it would be possible for a scientist who did live in a Christian culture to come to an interpretation about the evidence that was not, to the best of their ability, related to Genesis in any way? Could they kind of "forget" or disregard Genesis to come up with interpretations that were neither for or against Genesis, but were simply the best interpretation of nothing but the evidence?If so, what would it take to substantiate to you that they had done just that?

That's not the issue that I was referring to. I was referring to your stated goal of determining why scientists seem so determined to disprove Genesis.The point, however, is that they are not trying to do that; they're trying to find out what is true about the past. It just so happens that that truth contradicts the account of Genesis. What silences that criticism? The vast success of the scientific worldview in making accurate, testable predictions about the natural world.You once mentioned "used-car salesmen", a comparison that is hardly charitable to scientists, but lets run with it. Used-car salesmen are notorious liars, but that doesn't mean they all must be. If you buy a car from such a salesman, who promised that the transmission was new, you might be suspicious, especially if you got a good deal. Maybe his claims of a great new transmission are just "interpretations of his worldview?"But you drive the car for 100,000 miles with no transmission issues of any kind. No interpretation of any worldview can fix a transmission; therefore there must really be truth to his interpretation - it must really be a good transmission. If he had lied, it would have been obvious that he had done so by now.Likewise, with science. It's fair to wonder what leads evolutionary scientists to come to the conclusions they do; perhaps some of them may even be motivated by a need to disprove what they see as primitive myths about our origins. But nonetheless, scientists have to talk about things in the real world, and the real world is what it is - no interpretation can change that. If evolution was simply a tissue of lies, distortions, and interpretation, it wouldn't be so successfully predictive and explanitory. The theory would disintigrate under a wieght of observations it couldn't explain and predictions that were ludicrously errant.But it hasn't. The fact that evolution is so successful at explaining disparate biological phenomenon, making accurate predictions about population genetics, and other things is all the proof we need that there's something to it.The proof is in the pudding. Surely you've heard that expression? You can pretend to be a world-class cook, you can talk the talk and dress the part, but your subterfge will be apparent the second they try the pudding. That's where the proof is. The proof that a used-car salesman didn't sell you a lemon is in the car itself; the proof that evolution is an accurate, scientifically valid framework is in the fact that evolution succeeds as a framework. No amount of "interpretation" can give you results like that unless you're on the right track.I don't know if I've made any of this any clearer to you; you seem to be hung up on interpretations and worldviews. None of that matters - it's the results that matter, and evolution gets the results. The Book of Genesis gets us nowhere, except maybe to an understanding of the mindset of ancient goatherds.

Take your time. I wouldn't want you to give yourself short shrift on this.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-12-2004 11:16 PM

"Concealed", I suppose, in the display cases in museums, on public display. You know, those places you go when you want to learn something.I guess that explains why you haven't seen the fossils, huh?