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Author Topic:   101 evidences for a young age...
Dr Adequate
Member (Idle past 274 days)
Posts: 16113
Joined: 07-20-2006


Message 31 of 135 (511162)
06-07-2009 6:57 AM


Much of the bibble in the geology section seems to confuse the proposition that something was formed millions of years ago with the proposition that it took millions of years to form.
This is why creationists come out with gibberish like this:
Observed examples of rapid island formation and maturation, such as Surtsey, which confound the notion that such islands take long periods of time to form.
A monment's thought, of course, would tell them that no geologist in the world has the notion that islands such as Surtsey take a long time to form --- but thought is not common among creationists.
There's also the usual gibberish about polystrate fossils. This is based on an almost unbelievable blunder --- creationists think that geologists think that the bedding planes in sedimentary rocks represent intervals of millions of years. Have these people never opened a geology textbook.
Then, of course, there are the flat lies, such as this one:
Water gaps. These are gorges cut through mountain ranges where rivers run. They occur worldwide and are part of what evolutionary geologists call discordant drainage systems. They are discordant because they don’t fit the deep time belief system.
No, that is not what "discordant" means.
And then there's just the outright bizarre:
Lack of plant fossils in many formations containing abundant animal / herbivore fossils. E.g., the Morrison Formation (Jurassic) in Montana. See Origins 21(1):51—56, 1994. Also the Coconino sandstone in the Grand Canyon has many track-ways (animals), but is almost devoid of plants. Implication: these rocks are not ecosystems of an era buried in situ over eons of time as evolutionists claim.
Yeah, either that or under normal conditions plants don't preserve so well as the hard parts of animals. But a grasp of the bleedin' obvious is not a prerequisite for being a creationist.
Damn, but these guys are dumb.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 32 of 135 (511353)
06-09-2009 1:18 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Coyote
06-04-2009 7:30 AM


The Bunny Blunder, yet again
quote:
96. Human population growth. Less than 0.5% p.a. growth from six people 4,500 years ago would produce today’s population. Where are all the people? if we have been here much longer?
Ah yes! The Bunny Blunder! In 1984, a few years after I had started my "creation science" studies, I heard a presentation given by Fred Edwords in which he presented Morris' human population growth claim -- which Henry Morris had presented in his 1961 book, The Genesis Flood, and repeated several more times over the years. When Edwords then gave the model's predicted world population at various times in the ancient past, those figures were found to be ridiculously low. Since Edwords had taken his figures from David Milne's article (Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid, Creation/Evolution Issue XIV, Fall 1984, pp. 1-5 -- Creationists, Population Growth, Bunnies, and the Great Pyramid | National Center for Science Education), I will quote from there:
quote:
As if these fatal flaws were not enough, Morris's calculation has ridiculous implications. For example, if we assume for the moment that human numbers really did grow exponentially at a per capita rate of r = 0.0033, starting with two people in 4300 BC, then we can calculate the world population of year 2500 BC. By Morris's calculation, that number is 750 individuals. If Egypt, with about 1% of the Earth's land surface area, also had 1% of its population, then about eight people must have lived in Egypt at that time. However, the Great Pyramid of the Egyptian king Cheops was built in about 2500 BC. If the creationists are right, then the Pyramid was built by eight people. In fact, suppose that the entire population of the Earth lived in Egypt at that time. Half of the 750 souls were women (who I don't think worked on the Pyramid); half of the males were children (ditto) and a few exalted characters (Cheops himself and his assorted advisors) undoubtedly convinced the others that nobility should not have to haul heavy limestone blocks. That leaves about 150 able-bodied men to quarry 2,300,000 blocks (ranging from 2.5 to 50 tons in weight), haul them to the construction site and raise the 480-foot Pyramid. Does anyone who has seen this colossal monument believe that 150 men could have built it? Yet that is what Morris, through the magic of his calculation, must boldly assert.
World history prior to 2500 BC, in the Morris scenario, becomes even more remarkable. Six pyramids, some comparable in size to the Great Pyramid, were built at nearby sites within the previous 200-year period (as were numerous accessory causeways, temples, etc.).14 The parents and grandparents of the 750 people at the Great Pyramid site must have built them, at the rate of one every 33 years. Their numbers (which, recall, constituted the entire human population of the Earth) were fewer thenonly about 300-400 soulsand they were distracted by the need to perform a fast migratory quick-step over to Mesopotamia to build (and abandon) a number of fortified towns that appeared at about that time. The action was even more frenzied in earlier centuries. World population in 3600 BC, as calculated by the Morris equation, was 20 people. A century earlier, in 3700 BC, it was 14 people. And a century earlier than that, it was 10 people. So, in the Morris scenario, a world population of one or two dozen people must have rushed back and forth between Crete, Mesopotamia, the Indus River valley, and other sites of ancient civilization, energetically building and abandoning enough cities, irrigation works, monuments and other artifacts to leave us with the mistaken impression that millions of people populated the ancient world.
Needless to say, when Edwords presented those figures, it brought down the house, the audience was laughing so hard.
The reason why Milne calls this claim "The Bunny Blunder" and why it is wrong is also given in that article:
quote:
To understand why the creationists are wrong, consider this example. Suppose that a creationist were studying snowshoe hares, somewhere in Canada in the early 1930's. At that time, the bunnies were multiplying at a per capita rate of about r = 0.57 (57% per year). If that was all that our biologist knew about the rabbits' history and biology, the Morris calculation would enable him to determine that the first two snowshoe hares of all time appeared on Earth in late 1885, during the Cleveland Administration.8 Not only that, but the Morris calculation applied to minks, muskrats, foxes, and lynxes (which were also multiplying at that time) would also place the date of the creation of the Earth and life in the late 1800's. If one accepts that the Cleveland Administration was not the perpetrator of it all, then where are the errors? Here, two major mistakes are involved. First, the creationist in this instance did not use all of the known facts in arriving at his conclusion. Second, he assumed that the entire rabbit history was similar to that of those last few years that he was able to observe. In fact, the hares (and their predators) are known to cycle in abundance. In 1933 their numbers were increasing, but only as the latest in a series of roller coaster ups and downs that can be traced clear back into the 1700's. Over the long haul, r = 0 for the bunnies, a fact that would not be evident to an observer who watched them only during the early 30's.
Now, to be truthful, Milne had arrived at his figures using Morris' rate of population growth and a "Garden of Eden" starting point and initial population, rather than Batten's stated rate and a "Noah's Flood" starting point and population. So we should take those parameters and plug them into the formula and see what the model reveals in that case.
The formula for "pure-birth" population growth (as observed in fruit fly jars before the food starts to run out) is:
P(n) = P(1 + r)**n
where:

P(n) is the population generated after n years.
P is the initial population
r is the rate of population growth
n is the number of years
** is the FORTRAN symbol for exponentiation, hence
(1+r)**n would read "the quantity 1 plus r raised to the nth power"
Since Batten wrote: "Less than 0.5% p.a. growth from six people 4,500 years ago ... ", our values for those parameters would be:

P = 6
r = 0.005
n = number of years since 2500 BCE
Now, at this point I wanted to compare the results from Batten's parameters with Milne's results from Morris' parameters, but I immediately ran into a snag. Milne was looking at the results on and before 2500 BCE, whereas Batten is only looking at that date and thereafter. Since 2500 BCE was when the Great Pyramid was built, then instead of it having been built by hand with a world population of 750 (including women and children), Batten offers us a world population of only six.
For the dates before 2500 BCE, Batten really offers nothing. Except for an enigma. He has given us a date for The Flood of about 2500 BCE. Since this Flood was supposed to have been so cataclysmic as to completely reshape the surface of the earth and cause near-instantaneous plate movement, how is it that the Great Pyramid and the six pyramids that preceded it and the Sphynx and all those other cities and irrigation works spread out from Crete to the Indus River Valley are still there and did not get destroyed by The Flood?
However, here are Batten's predicted populations for various dates, with actual populations for 1 CE on (using Morris' doubling dates) -- you might want to sanity-check them against what was happening in history:

2400 BCE 10
2300 BCE 16
2200 BCE 27
2100 BCE 44
2000 BCE 73
1800 BCE 197
1600 BCE 534
1400 BCE 1,448
1200 BCE 3,927
1000 BCE 10,647
500 BCE 128,906
1 CE 1,560,650 133,000,000 1/85-th what it should have been
400 11,474,409 End of the Roman Empire
800 84,363,589 Charlemagne
1650 5,852,043,422 545,000,000 10.74 times too great
1750 9,636,375,517 728,000,000 13.24 times too great
1800 12,365,645,826 906,000,000 13.65 times too great
1900 20,362,119,366 1,610,000,000 12.65 times too great
1950 26,129,197,217 2,400,000,000 10.89 times too great
2009 35,069,026,520 6,783,421,727 5 times too great

Even without the absolutely ludicrous historical conclusions that this claim would require us to arrive at, we can plainly see that it does not match reality. Ie, it doesn't work. But what I find truly amazing is that Batten had never bothered to check his model, to plug in his parameters and see what results it would give him for this year.
Futher Reading:
Wikipedia "World Population" at World population - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "World Population Estimates" at Estimates of historical world population - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "Population growth" at Population growth - Wikipedia
Wikipedia "Carrying Capacity" at Carrying capacity - Wikipedia
Michael Olnick, An Introduction to Mathematical Models in the Social and Life Sciences, 1978, Addison-Wesley Publishing Co -- over several chapters, develops a model of population growth as it discussed several of the problems inherent in such models; creationists' "Bunny Blunder" is a "pure birth" model, the most navely simplistic and least accurate type of population growth model.
Edited by dwise1, : table formatting

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Nuggin
Member (Idle past 2483 days)
Posts: 2965
From: Los Angeles, CA USA
Joined: 08-09-2005


Message 33 of 135 (511378)
06-09-2009 2:45 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Coyote
06-04-2009 7:30 AM


C-14
The profoundly stupid thing about their argument is this:
They use C-14 dating 4 times on their list saying that it gives an age in "thousands of years".
While we ALL KNOW the mistake they deliberately made was done so to mislead the ignorant, the bigger point is this:
The INCORRECT date they came up with is STILL TOO OLD for their claim!!!

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pandion
Member (Idle past 2991 days)
Posts: 166
From: Houston
Joined: 04-06-2009


Message 34 of 135 (511484)
06-10-2009 12:48 AM
Reply to: Message 32 by dwise1
06-09-2009 1:18 PM


Re: The Bunny Blunder, yet again
dwise1 writes:
snip of impressive analysis of creationist nonsense
I usually don't approve of responses that are nothing more than vacuous cheer-leading. Here I'm going to make an exception. That was an excellent post. I hope you see this before the moderators hide it as "off topic".
Edited by pandion, : No reason given.

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pandion
Member (Idle past 2991 days)
Posts: 166
From: Houston
Joined: 04-06-2009


Message 35 of 135 (511485)
06-10-2009 12:59 AM
Reply to: Message 33 by Nuggin
06-09-2009 2:45 PM


Re: C-14
Nuggin writes:
The profoundly stupid thing about their argument is this:
They use C-14 dating 4 times on their list saying that it gives an age in "thousands of years".
While we ALL KNOW the mistake they deliberately made was done so to mislead the ignorant, the bigger point is this:
The INCORRECT date they came up with is STILL TOO OLD for their claim!!!
It's even worse than that. Over the years I have seen creationists cite C-14 dating of archaeological sites in the Levant as evidence of the "truth" of the Bible. Funny that creationists can reject C-14 dating out of one side of their mouth and praise it in support of scripture out of the other. It seems that C-14 dates are reliable back to about 4,500 years ago when a global FLUD event somehow adjusted rates of radio active decay. All dates older than 4,500 ya actually date to the single year of the FLUD.

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Adminnemooseus
Administrator
Posts: 3974
Joined: 09-26-2002


Message 36 of 135 (511491)
06-10-2009 1:51 AM
Reply to: Message 34 by pandion
06-10-2009 12:48 AM


The "Post of the Month" forum?
I usually don't approve of responses that are nothing more than vacuous cheer-leading. Here I'm going to make an exception. That was an excellent post.
You know, there is a topic just for that purpose. And there, it will bring dwise1's message to the attention of a lot more people, both now and maybe in the future.
See the POTM guidelines in that message 1.
NO REPLIES TO THIS MESSAGE.
Adminnemooseus

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pandion
Member (Idle past 2991 days)
Posts: 166
From: Houston
Joined: 04-06-2009


Message 37 of 135 (511500)
06-10-2009 2:50 AM


Without any intent to respond to any particular post, I have become aware of a forum on this board for the purpose of recognizing exceptional posts. I have recognized a post in this thread in that forum.
http://EvC Forum: June, 2009, Posts of the Month -->EvC Forum: June, 2009, Posts of the Month

  
Taz
Member (Idle past 3282 days)
Posts: 5069
From: Zerus
Joined: 07-18-2006


Message 38 of 135 (511510)
06-10-2009 3:31 AM
Reply to: Message 32 by dwise1
06-09-2009 1:18 PM


Re: The Bunny Blunder, yet again
Dwise1, while you posted an incredible message on the Bunny Blunder, I'd like to point to a much simpler way at viewing this particular population growth model.
About 500 BC there were about 128,906 people, according to the model. Right about this time, the Persian Empire reached its height, Greece warring against Persia for a few centuries, China divided into 7 massive kingdoms during the spring and autumn and warring states periods, etc. All of this happening all around the world with all the fortress cities being built with a world wide population of a little over 100 thousand people?
There was a lecture I read about (I do regret very much that I missed it) with the presenter actually divided up the supposed population at the time according to the creationist model and showed that according to the model 10 people built the Mesopotamian civilizations, 20 people built the great city states of Greece, 30 people founded the Chinese dynasties, etc. By the end, any sane person would have seen just how funny and ricidulous this particular population growth model was. And yet we keep seeing it popping up like bunnies...

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Dr Jack
Member
Posts: 3514
From: Immigrant in the land of Deutsch
Joined: 07-14-2003
Member Rating: 8.2


Message 39 of 135 (511518)
06-10-2009 4:29 AM
Reply to: Message 32 by dwise1
06-09-2009 1:18 PM


Re: The Bunny Blunder, yet again
Quite apart from contradicting known reality, it also contradicts the Bible (!). According to Numbers, there were 603,550 Jews who left Egypt, and various dates are given for the Exodus from 1290 BC - 1550 BC, by these numbers, the Bible itself is out by a factor of 300 looking only at the Jews themselves and ignoring the Egyptians altogether.

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RAZD
Member (Idle past 1395 days)
Posts: 20714
From: the other end of the sidewalk
Joined: 03-14-2004


Message 40 of 135 (511665)
06-11-2009 3:29 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Coyote
06-04-2009 7:30 AM


C14 dates too young ...
Hi Coyote,
The "101 evidences" includes the usual nonsense, refuted over and over but which keeps coming back.
Aren't these all the same issue of radioactive formation of C14 and background levels?
quote:
51. Carbon-14 in coal suggests ages of thousands of years and clearly contradict ages of millions of years.
52. Carbon-14 in oil again suggests ages of thousands, not millions, of years.
53. Carbon-14 in fossil wood also indicates ages of thousands, not millions, of years.
54. Carbon-14 in diamonds suggests ages of thousands, not billions, of years.
Curiously the link for the oil one goes to diamonds - great proof-reading and cross-checking, eh? They go on to "counter" the "Objections (technical)" with more typical answers:
quote:
In any case, the mean of the 14C/C ratios in Dr Baumgardner’s diamonds was close to 0.120.01 pMC, well above that of the lab’s background of purified natural gas (0.08 pMC).
...
The 14C ‘dates’ for the diamonds of 55,700 years were still much older than the biblical timescale. This misses the point:
Yeah, it misses the point that this is the limit of C-14 dating and it is not above the level of background radiation in normal objects.
This background level of radiation is why the normal limit to C14 is generally considered to be 45,000 to 50,000 years
http://id-archserve.ucsb.edu/...y/08_Radiocarbon_Dating.html
quote:
The practical upper limit is about 50,000 years, because so little C-14 remains after almost 9 half-lives that it may be hard to detect and obtain an accurate reading, regardless of the size of the sample.
Radiocarbon Date calculation
quote:
It is vital for a radiocarbon laboratory to know the contribution to routine sample activity of non-sample radioactivity. Obviously, this activity is additional and must be removed from calculations. In order to make allowances for background counts and to evaluate the limits of detection, materials which radiocarbon specialists can be fairly sure contain no activity are measured under identical counting conditions as normal samples. Background samples usually consist of geological samples of infinite age such as coal, lignite, limestone, ancient carbonate, athracite, marble or swamp wood. By measuring the activity of a background sample, the normal radioactivity present while a sample of unknown age is being measured can be accounted for and deducted.
Figure 1: This gif shows the comparison in radioactivity between a sample, or unknown (green area) , a modern standard (dark blue) and a background (small red peaks) derived from beta decay. The scale represents log E (energy).
And the presence of background levels doesn't really affect ages less than 40,000 years by a significant margin, especially considering that these ages derived are too young for the actual ages. Thus these ages are still valid, and still a problem for YECs to deal with.
Enjoy.
Edited by RAZD, : jpg added

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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5925
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 41 of 135 (511711)
06-11-2009 10:46 AM
Reply to: Message 40 by RAZD
06-11-2009 3:29 AM


Re: C14 dates too young ...
To offer an analogy:
Let's say that I have a very accurate postal scale that can measure up to 10 ounces. So when I try to weigh myself on that postal scale, it tells me that I only weigh 10 ounces. So I publish those results and report on all forms that ask for my weight that I weigh 10 ounces and I repeatedly insist that I weigh 10 ounces.
Since I am not an idiot, doing that would make me a liar.
Those creationists who made and use those C-14 claims are also not idiots.

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Taz
Member (Idle past 3282 days)
Posts: 5069
From: Zerus
Joined: 07-18-2006


Message 42 of 135 (511721)
06-11-2009 12:26 PM
Reply to: Message 41 by dwise1
06-11-2009 10:46 AM


Re: C14 dates too young ...
This bears the question in mind. Have these people no shame? I could understand that they wouldn't have a shame if their lies can't be caught, but these lies are so obviously lies. Of all the time they spend telling the rest of us we're going to hell, aren't they afraid of the hell fire?

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wirkkalaj
Member (Idle past 5324 days)
Posts: 22
From: Fernley
Joined: 07-03-2009


Message 43 of 135 (514082)
07-03-2009 3:44 PM


I like to point out that there are hundreds of ancient artifacts, cave drawings and other relics that have depictions of dinosaurs on them. While this does not really prove anything about young earth. It does show how blindly wrong the evolutionists are in their conclusions that the dinosaurs died off millions of years ago.
If they can be that wrong about the dinosaurs and not willing to concede that they did indeed live along side humans throughtout the ages, then why should I believe them in anything else concerning ages?
Edited by Adminnemooseus, : Reset to eliminate signature spam.

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Brian
Member (Idle past 4949 days)
Posts: 4659
From: Scotland
Joined: 10-22-2002


Message 44 of 135 (514084)
07-03-2009 3:55 PM
Reply to: Message 43 by wirkkalaj
07-03-2009 3:44 PM


Such as?
I like to point out that there are hundreds of ancient artifacts, cave drawings and other relics that have depictions of dinosaurs on them.
It's not that I don't trust you wirkkalj, but could you perhaps support this claim with references/examples?

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Taz
Member (Idle past 3282 days)
Posts: 5069
From: Zerus
Joined: 07-18-2006


Message 45 of 135 (514087)
07-03-2009 5:00 PM
Reply to: Message 44 by Brian
07-03-2009 3:55 PM


Re: Such as?

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