Summations Only

OK, so then you name the Christian deity who, according to Christian doctrine, is served through lies and deception.

I disagree. It does have a bearing, because you accuse science of the same things. The simple fact is that science is far more capable of detecting and dealing with errors and scientists are strongly motivated to seek out and correct or eliminate errors. Yet you accuse science of the complete opposite, of the very incapabilities and motivations displayed by religion.It also demonstrates your dishonesty, such that nobody can take at face value anything you say, including what you say about science. Of course you could offer some support for your bald assertions, but you refuse to do so. You have nothing to support your bald assertions and you know it.Therefore you concede defeat and must agree that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

There is a basic requirement of the recipient of being able to understand what is presented.If the example is text and you do not know how to read anything, then what possible example could we present that would be simple enough even for you? What form of text would be simple enough for someone incapable of reading text?Or even more propos, what possible text example could ever be acceptable to someone who rejects all forms of text?You need to learn enough to understand the explanations you are given.For example, I am a social dancer. Part of dancing is turning and spins. That is quite simply a matter of conservation of angular momentum, basic physics. Now try to explain that to someone with no knowledge of physics nor any desire to learn any.You are in the category of having no desire to learn.

From Taq's Message 897 (bet you thought you had buried it too deep for us): So what's your assumption here? Blind random luck producing those results? Yet more of your deceptive lies. And yet you continue to behave as if you believed that evolution contradicts the idea of a Creator. Where do you get such nonsense from? I know where, from your creationist handlers who are feeding you lie after lie.What about "creation science" itself? A deliberately crafted deception.You have been fooled and you continue to be played for a fool.

Bullshit! Complete and utter bullshit lies! Is your soul so completely and utterly lost? Have you really damned yourself beyond all possibility of redemption?I would think that your trying to blame the Trinity for "creation science" would classify as blasphemy in the highest degree. The Trinity has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with that complete travesty known as "creation science". The only Christian deity who could possibly have anything to do with "creation science" is from the Deceiver, Satan."Creation science" is a completely human invention. Man created it, Man created its claims, Man spreads it. It is not the work of the Trinity, but rather of humans such as Gish, Morris, Hovind. It is a deliberately crafted deception whose initial purpose was to deceive the US courts by hiding the actual reason for creationists' opposition to the teaching of evolution, that actual reason being purely religious. Then it was used to deceive the general public into supporting or at least not opposing their political agenda of passing laws to change school curricula. Finally it came to be used to deceive individuals into converting to their false creationist religion. Thus it leads to destroying Christianity, which would be opposing the Trinity and everything that the Trinity is supposed to stand for. Now, according to actual Christian doctrine (not your creationist bullshit), isn't that what your Satan is supposed to be working towards?Your creationist handlers are the people who are feeding you their nonsense. Isn't it time for you to start listening to the truth? Instead of opposing it.  Now, if you truly believe that the Trinity is talking directly to you and feeding you all that creationist nonsense, then here's some advice from personal experience that Reese gave his younger brother, Dewey (quoting from memory):

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Don't do what the voices in your head tell you! They are not your friends!

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 Edited by dwise1, : Completed the thoughts, cleaned up the qs boxes.

What the hell are you talking about? Don't you ever think before posting? Or are you so accustomed to feeding on bullshit that you automatically spout it?

{to Dredge's use of a SJ Gould quote-mine:} Why would you assume that Dredge had read the article? I'm quite sure that he had just lifted it from a creationist quote-mining source and fraudulently claimed their claimed source as his own -- and I'm also quite sure that his creationist handlers had themselves committed the exact same fraud, claiming someone else's quote-mined material as coming from the claimed source.Claiming a source that they have never seen themselves instead of their actual creationist source is SOP for creationists and is practiced on all levels. I document a classic example on my page, Moon Dust. In a debate I attended, Dr. Henry Morris made the standard claim that if the moon were as old as we claim, then it should be covered with a layer of dust about 280 feet thick. He claimed as his source a NASA document dated from 1976, "well into the space age." In fact, since he was responding to the criticism that creationists use out-dated sources, that very date, 1976, was the most important part of that claim. I asked him for more information and Dr. Duane Gish sent me a letter written by Harold Slusher which named the document and developed the calculation -- the calculation did not come from the NASA document, but rather it used a few rates from that document. Then I found that very NASA document in the university library. It was a 1967 printing of papers presented at a conference in August 1965, before our first soft landing on the moon on 02 June 1966. In fact, that date of 9-13 August 1965 was very clearly displayed on the front cover, such that nobody who had actually held that document in their hands could have missed it. It was obvious that Morris had have never seen that document, yet he claimed it as his source. It has since become obvious that Slusher had also never seen that document even though he also claimed it as his source; other mistakes he made (eg, saying it was "Volume II" instead of "Volume 11" as was very clearly printed on the front cover) leads me to suspect that his actual source was hand-written by another unidentified creationist.IOW, creationists not only lie regularly about what scientists say, but they also lie regularly about what their actual sources are.Edited by dwise1, : Explicitly attributing the qs box to Tangle in order to improve the word flow

Do you have any idea what the difference is? Do you even know what an atheist is? Or what an agnostic is? Any idea at all?Your determined avoidance of divulging what your definitions are and of how you determine whether a person or organization is "atheistic" is a very strong indicator that this is yet another topic about which you are completely clueless.

Here's a fun quote-mining fact: Your objection to that piece of quote-mining would be the same as our objections to the quote-mining done by your creationist handlers. They are lying to you!

{intonation=sarcasm}Well, that's a detailed citation!{/intonation} "an essay"? What, you read it and you don't even know what the title was? Nor what page in that book it was lifted from? At least you mentioned the book's name, so I guess we should thankful for small miracles. But if you had read it, then why didn't you know those things?Oh, yeah, you didn't read it. Like Slusher and Morris with that NASA document, you have never ever even seen the source that you claim. And you wonder why we are so disgusted with creationist dishonesty.Well, I have seen that book and I had read that essay. In fact, it's sitting on the desk here in front of me. There really is no substitute for going back to the actual original source. You should try it some time. I have found that it is the best first step you can take in refuting a creationist claim.In the following, missing text will be in bold and changed text in yellow -- there are some changes which are clearly typographical, so I refrained from marking those.Sage advice to anyone reading a creationist quote: always check to find out what they are hiding in those ellipses (the "..."). Of course, there are some valid uses for ellipses, but creationist use is commonly to leave out necessary context so that they can change the meaning in order to misrepresent the source. One classic example of this was a single-sentence quote with an ellipsis in the middle. What was the creationist hiding in that ellipsis? Only several pages, almost all of his essay, such that the first half of the quote was from the first page and the second, unrelated half was from the last or penultimate page, such that he ended up splicing together two sentence fragments that had nearly nothing to do with each other in order to create a new sentence that said something the quoted scientist was not saying.Part of the context from which that had been lifted is that it is in a list of responses to the creationist arguments which Raup had just spent ten pages presenting and discussing. In keeping with restoring that lost context, I will include the other three items in that list and their concluding paragraphs. And keep in mind that I had to type all of that straight from the source. "The Geological and Paleontological Arguments of Creationism", David M. Raup, pp 147-162, Scientists Confront Creationism, edited by Laurie R. Godfrey, 1983 -- quote taken from page 157, buried ten pages into the essay, missing text (in bold in order to identify it, with ) taken from pages 152 to 158:

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The Rocks and Fossils Say Yes!

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In this section I will respond to the four main arguments of the scientific creationists presented earlier in this essay.
1. Catastrophism. The catastophism argument is a straw man. ...
{concluding paragraph}The question then is not whether catastrophes occurred (including large floods) but whether they were relatively few in number, with one large flood dominating geologic history. Assuming that our geologic time scale is reasonably accurate, geologists and paleontologists have identified many thousand separate catastrophic events, which means that any scenario based on catastrophism must include a very much larger number of small and large catastrophes than is allowed by the creationist model. Therefore, the general argument concerning catastrophism is a nonargument. Creationists claim that geology says that there should be no catastrophes. Creationists find some catastrophes and geologists find many -- far more than are suggested by the creationist model. I suspect that the problem results from a basic misunderstanding of geology as it is now practiced. The misunderstanding has been caused in part by the geologists themselves: the ninteenth-century idea of uniformitarianism and gradualism still exists in popular treatments of geology, in some museum exhibits, and in lower level textbooks. It is even still taught in secondary school classrooms, and one can hardly blame creationists for having the idea that the conventional wisdom in geology is still a noncatastrophic one.

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2. Relative time scales. ...
{concluding paragraph}An interesting irony in this whole business is that the creationists accept as fact the mistaken notion that the geologic record shows a progression from simple to complex organisms. Faced with the problem of reconciling this presumed sequence with rapid deposition by the Flood, the creationists develop painful explanations of the sequence: large mammals floated to the surface of the Flood sea, complex (and therefore more mobile and intelligent) animals were able to escape to higher ground, and so on. The creationists have fit essentially false information into their model -- something that would have been quite unnecessary had they read the geologic literature more carefully.

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3. Absolute dating. ...
{concluding paragraph} The most significant finding of radiometric dating, of course, is that the earth is extremely old, perhaps 4.5 billion years old, and that life on earth is almost as old. This is in direct conflict with the ten thousand-year-old earth of scientific creationism. Although there could be some error in radiometric dating (and probably is), it is inconceivable, to me at least, that the error could be anything approaching the difference between billions of years and thousands of years.

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4. Darwinian predictions. Darwin predicted that the fossil record should show a reasonably smooth continuum of ancestor-descendant pairs with a satisfactory number of intermediates between major groups. Darwin even went so far as to say that if this were not found in the fossil record, his general theory of evolution would be in serious jeopardy. Such smooth transitions were not found in Darwin's time, and he explained this in part on the basis of an incomplete geologic record and in part on the lack of study of that record. We are now more than a hundred years after Darwin and the situation is little changed. Since Darwin a tremendous expansion of paleontological knowledge has taken place, and we know much more about the fossil record than was known in his time, but the basic situation is not much different. We actually may have fewer examples of smooth transition than we had in Darwin's time because some of the old examples have turned out to be invalid when studied in more detail. To be sure, some new intermediate or transitional forms have been found, particularly among land vertebrates. But if Darwin were writing today, he would still have to cite a disturbing lack of missing links or transitional forms between the major groups of organisms.
How does the evolutionist explain the lack of intermediates? I see three principal areas of explanation, all of which probably operate to some degree. The first of these is a simple artifact of our taxonomic system of classification. The practicing paleontologist is obliged to place any newly found fossil in the Linnean system of taxonomy. Thus, if one finds a birdlike reptile or a reptilelike bird (such as Archaeopteryx), there is no procedure in the taxonomic system for labeling and classifying this as an intermediate between the two classes Aves and Reptilia. Rather, the practicing paleontologist must decide to place his fossil in one category or the other. The impossibility of officially recognizing transitional forms produces an artificial dichotomy between biologic groups. It is conventional to classify Archaeopteryx as a bird. I have no doubt, however, that if it were permissible under the rules of taxonomy to put Archaeopteryx in some sort of category intermediate between birds and reptiles that we would indeed do that. Thus, because of the nature of classification, there appear to be many fewer intermediates than probably exist.
In this context, it should be noted that creationists occasionally make the argument that the Darwinian model should predict a complete absence of distinct kinds of organisms.

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quote:

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If all organisms have actually dscended by evolution from common ancestors, it seems inexplicable that there should be any distinct categories of organisms at all. One would certainly expect that nature would instead exhibit a continual series of organisms, with each grading into the other so imperceptibly that any kind of classification system would be impossible.
{Boardman, Koontz, Morris 1973, p. 68}

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This, unfortunately, shows a lack of understanding of the separation of genetic systems through reproductive isolation. There is little or no gene flow between species because they do not normally interbreed. Thus each species is able to evolve on a course independent of all others, and there is no opportunity for blending once speciation has taken place. Given time, and perhaps subsequent speciation events, organisms become distinct. By the same reasoning, major groups such as molluscs and arthropods become increasingly distinct and separated by anatomical gaps. Thus, the presence of distinct kinds of organisms (especially when viewed at an instant in time) is a reasonable prediction of the evolutionary model. Because the creationist model also predicts distinct kinds (Gish 1978), their mere presence cannot be a basis for argument between the two viewpoints. The only argument is whether the historical record of fossils should show more transitions between the distinct kinds than it does.
A second line of explanation for the underrepresentation of intermediates is the same one that Darwin used, namely that the fossil record is incomplete. We have as fossils a tiny fraction of the species that have existed. There are many ways of documenting this, but one is simply to look at the comparative numbers of extinct and living species. There are something like 2 million species known to be living today. We know that the average duration of a species is short relative to the total span of geologic time. Therefore, there must have been turnover in the species composition of the earth many times since the beginning of the fossil record. If we had even reasonably good fossil preservation, the number of known fossil species should thus be some large multiple of the number of species living today. Yet only about an quarter of a million fossil species have been found. This can only lead to the conclusion that the odds against fossilization are so high that we are seeing just a tiny fragment of past life. Also, along the general idea of catastrophism, the fossils that we do see depend largely upon occasional or unusual physical and biological events, and therefore the record is not a uniform or random sampling of life of the past. Under these circumstances, finding transitional forms (or any other particular form) is unlikely, and it is thus not surprising that our record appears to be quite uneven and jerky. In addition, most major groups of organisms originated quite early in the geological record, in that part of it that is especially poorly documented and where intermediate forms would be even less likely to be found. In this context, it is not surprising that our best intermediate or transitional forms are among land vertebrates, which evolved rather late in geologic time.
A third general explanation for the relative lack of intermediates is that transitional forms constitute very short intervals of geologic time if, as many evolutionary theorists now believe, the change from one major type to another occurs rather rapidly (the punctuated equilibrium model of Eldredge and Gould 1972). This simply lessens the probability of finding intermediates.
With these considerations in mind, one must argue that the fossil record is compatible with the predictions of evolutionary theory.

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REFERENCES CITED

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Boardman, William, Koontz, Robert F., and Morris, Henry. 1973. Science and creation. San Diego: Creation-Science Research Center.

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Eldredge, Niles and Gould, Stephen J. 1972. Punctuated equilibria: an alternaitve to phyletic gradualism. In Models in paleobiology, ed. T.J.M. Schopf, pp 82-115. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Co.

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Gish, Duane T. 1978 Evolution? The fossils say no! San Diego: Creation-Life Pub.

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So then David Raup was not saying what you were trying to claim. You posted a lie. Indeed, over the years we see creationists posting such lies so frequently as to be described as "constantly". It very quickly gets to the point that the moment a creationist makes any kind of statement, the safest course of action is to assume that it's just yet another creationist lie. Sorry, but that's what creationists have taught us all too well.Also, I could not help but notice a number of places where the quoted text had changed. Those copy and transmission errors tell me that the version that you picked up from -- since everybody knows that you never read the original, please tell us what your actual creationist source is -- is a copy in a chain of copies that has been getting passed around the creationist community for who knows how long. It's like those email hoaxes and urban legends that have been getting passed along for decades, accumulating superficial changes and even getting rewritten for their time.An example of the last was the urban legend of Nixon going out for a swim in the ocean there in San Clemente ("Western White House") and nearly drowning but was saved by a teenager. Grateful, he offered the boy a reward, but the only reward the boy wanted was that he not tell his father, who would be furious that he had saved Nixon. The same story had also been told of other past presidents, such as FDR, as well as of foreign dictators, such as Hitler, and I wouldn't doubt that it had surfaced again since Nixon.The same false story passed around as anonymously as true, somethings redressed to make it appear more recent. That also describes the majority of creationist claims, especially the young-earth claims. Ever hear the one about the NASA computer that discovered Joshua's "Lost Day"? Case in point.So, bottom line: Why does your religion have to depend almost completely on lies?

Huh. And here I had always thought it was because they had nothing else except for lies.

Just to trigger discussion. I took numerical methods at university around 1980.
Basically, numerical methods involves using programming methods to approximate higher math functions such as integration (many integrals can be extremely difficult to actually solve if not virtually impossible, so approximating them can be a tempting alternative, especially for engineering applications. The numerical methods class offered by the computer science department was fairly easy, concentrating mainly on learning the various methods used. The math department's two semesters were more rigorous and dealt more with the proofs for the various approaches, part of which was calculating the error, which is to say the upper bound on the error for that method.Creationists don't seem to understand error, but it is something that is an integral part of all observational sciences. Scientists know that every observation they make will involve some degree of observational error and they are trained to determine how much observational error exists. It is a value that can be calculated.In contrast, creationists try to use error as a hidey-hole, as a coping mechanism through which to ignore the realities that they can no longer ignore, but at the same time declare glimmers of doubt within which they try to hide whole worlds. Looking up some classic false YEC claims (eg, the Shrinking Sun, Niagara Falls) on Answers in Genesis I'm seeing them backing away from those false YEC claims while at the same time trying to still claim some, any, degree of uncertainty and doubt.The problem for creationists is that we can calculate the percent error that exists, usually an upper limit on that error (ie, the maximum possible error, which means that the actual error in any application is usually much less). And we can also calculate the percent error that they need have exist in order to make 10,000 years false appear to be about 4.5 billion years. And when we do so, we find that no realistic percent error calculation could ever possibly meet their demands.Well, it's been nearly 40 years since I've done those calculations, so I'm rather rusty. Does anybody see this as a promising tack to take so that they may take it up?Just throwing that idea out there.

Faith, when I started studying "creation science" back in 1981, I honestly assumed that maybe they did have some kind of evidence to support their claims. In all the time since then, I have never once seen any of that purported evidence. Instead, I have personally witnessed them misrepresenting and lying about the evidence and about the science dealing with that evidence. Consistently, persistently, for nearly four decades now.Faith, have you ever read my web page, Why I Oppose Creation Science (or, How I got to Here from There)? As stated, I had started studying "creation science" back around 1981. Around 1985, I had the opportunity to ask of a co-worker, Charles, a perennial question of mine that no "true Christian" (I'm sure you recognize that as a pejorative) has ever dared to answer: Does Christian doctrine condone "lying for the Lord"? Outside of initial responses to the negative (ie, no it is not condoned!), "true Christians" have been universally silent on this matter for about three decades.On that webpage, I describe how Charles and I attended a debate in on 28 September 1985 between two teams of two: Henry Morris and Duane Gish of the ICR, the very creators of "creation science", versus Frank Awbrey and William Thwaites (frequent contributors to the NCSE's publications who together taught an actual Two-Model class at San Diego State University in which half the lectures were given by the ICR). That was also where I heard Morris make his false moondust claim, citing a "1976" NASA document ("written well into the space age") which turned out to actually predate even our first soft lunar landing in 1966 -- read my Moon Dust page for more information; a main point is that both Morris and Slusher (Morris' actual source even though he falsely claimed that NASA document as his source; ie, he lied to you) had never ever even seen the NASA source that they all claim -- which means that they lied! Follow the links!It was not there but elsewhere that I described Charles' reaction to the debate. As we were leaving, he was in shock. He kept muttering, "We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they present it? We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they present it?We have mountains of evidence. Why didn't they present it?"Creationists? Mountains of evidence? Really? What fucking evidence? None whatsoever!Nearly four decades for you to present your evidence. Absolutely nothing whatsoever. And you have the audacity to expect us to take your fake bullshit seriously?You are getting every single ounce of respect that you are due. Absolutely none whatsoever.

Did you even quote Raup? Or did you just copy somebody else's quote-mining of that article? That article whose name you didn't even provide. And why the copy errors?If you do have a copy of Raup's article sitting in front of you, then provide us with a few more quotes. Such as the last two entries in his bibliography on page 162. And the first paragraph of the Introduction section on page 147.I very much doubt that you can meet those two simple requests, because I am quite sure that you do not possess a copy of that article. I am quite sure that you did not create that quote-mine yourself, but rather that you had gotten it from one of your creationist handlers (please to not blaspheme against the Trinity again). I am quite sure that your claim which I just quoted is a deliberate lie. Because you and the rest of the creationist community almost constantly use claims which are lies. They lie about the evidence, they lie about the science, they lie about what scientists say, and then they lie to cover up those lies. "Creation science" itself is a deliberately crafted deliberate deception for the purpose of fooling the courts, but then it was repurposed to deceive people into converting. And creationists proclaim that they do that to support and defend their religion, to serve their god. With lies and deception.So why does your religion have to depend almost completely on lies?

Because I still had two years of active duty when I received my Computer Science degree and I only needed four more classes to earn the Applied Math degree, I just went for it. However, my main strength in math was less in proofs but rather more in understanding the concepts and in problem-solving and practical applications. Needless to say, the Math Dept's Numerical Analysis classes were much more proof-oriented (ie, much more theoretical with very little attention given to implemention), so I kind of just squeaked through them. Good thing that my money degree has been computer science.The main thing I remember of the proofs was that we used them to determine the upper bound on that method's error, the maximum amount of error that we could possible incur. I was reminded of that recently in some exchanges with Dredge, such as: I then referred him to my unfinished page, Fundamental Differences Between Scientists and Creationists, which also discusses how we differ in our motivation and the great differences that that motivation makes (eg, scientists want to actually learn or discover something and have a vested interest in the validity and veracity of others' research that they are about to base their own research on, whereas a creationist just wants to convince others and himself, so all he is interested in is how convincing a claim sounds even if it happens to be completely false).Of course, Dredge has avoided those questions, but rather has continued to fault science for being subject to error while ignoring the fact that the same goes for religion which is worse off than science since it has no process nor mechanism for testing for and correcting errors. I sought to clarify that with the following (which I guess I had never had a chance to post yet): My experience in Numerical Analysis class verifies how science tackles the problem of error head-on. My science readings repeatedly address the problems of observational and other forms of error and how to deal with them. The very first lab in Physical Science class in junior college involved taking exact measurements of the same things and using the results to illustrate observational error, which shows that it's a problem that students are made aware of from the very beginning.In contrast, religionists refuse to acknowledge the existence of error and have no clue how much in error they are. Well, the honest ones recognize the problem, but unfortunately they are not the ones we encounter.The fact that science knows how to deal with error and can even determine the amount of error that is present leads to the other side of the issue.Most creationist claims and arguments involve a lot of hand-waving. They point to maybe one value (eg, the rate at which the sun loses mass due to fusion, about 4.6 million tonnes per second) and then they wave their hands and make incredible claims (eg, that the sun 5 billion years ago would have been incredibly huge and massive and would have sucked the earth). Unfortunately for them, when we actually do the math we find that their claims are false (eg, although the rate was right, the effect of those billions of years of mass loss only amounted to a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's mass and hence had extremely little effect on the ancient earth's orbit). The same thing with their claim that the ancient earth would have been spinning impossibly fast -- sometimes they give a rate (which is wrong and greatly inflated) and sometimes not, but with rare exceptions they never work out just how fast the ancient earth would have been spinning, but rather their versions of the claim consist almost entirely of hand-waving.{ NOTE: Kent Hovind's Solar Mass Loss Claim, Earth's Rotation is Slowing }More to the point, one way in which they will "disprove" radiometric dating is by proposing all manner of things such as massive neutrino bombardment as causing decay rates to change thus causing dating errors. Yet again, they do a lot of hand-waving and show no indication that any actual calculations had actually been performed to see just how much effect their proposed rate-changers would have. They just simply assert the results that they desire.Another form this takes can be found in recent articles at Answers in Genesis which admit that certain classic bogus creationists claims are indeed bogus (eg, the "shrinking sun", Niagara Falls), but then they try to grasp at straws by pointing to a slim sliver of doubt which they take to mean that their YEC theology could still be true after all. We often see a variation of that from creationists who take any amount of uncertainty or of honest ignorance as leaving a gap for their god, kind of a variation of the "God of the Gaps".In responding to claims of there being enough error in science to leave room for their claims, one approach we could take might be to calculate how great the error they claim would have to be, which is where that error calculation from class comes in. Not trusting my memory over 36 years, I consulted Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/...nge_and_difference#Percent_error) for the formula (and I did remember it correctly after all):% error = 100 × abs(experimental-value - theoretical_value) / abs(theoretical_value)
where:
theoretical_value = the expected value
experimental-value = the measured valueFor example, let's assume the expected value to be 100 million years, but the dating method gives us a measured value of 110 million years:% error = 100 × abs(110,000,000 - 100,000,000) / abs (100,000,000)
= 100 × abs( 10,000,000 ) / abs (100,000,000)
= 100 × 10,000,000 / 100,000,000
= 100 × 0.1
= 10 %10 million years is a lot of time to be off by, but compared to the actual age it's not really too unreasonable.Now let's assume the creationist case where the expected value is 10,000 years, but the dating method gives us a measured value of 100 million years:
% error = 100 × abs(100,000,000 - 10,000) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × abs( 99,990,000 ) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × 99,990,000 / 10,000
= 100 × 9999
= 999,900 %Now that is a helluva lot of error!Or more to the point of the age of the earth, let's calculate the amount of error it would take to measure a 10,000 year old earth as being 4.5 billion years old:% error = 100 × abs(4,500,000,000 - 10,000) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × abs( 4,499,990,000 ) / abs (10,000)
= 100 × 4,499,990,000 / 10,000
= 100 × 449,999
= 44,999,900 % Nearly 45 million percent error? Absolutely ridiculous! Obviously it is the assumption of a 10,000 year old earth that's wrong.From what I've read over the decades, most creationists schemes for things that might possibly change decay rates would have the effect of adding less than 1% error. I remember a list of isotope half-lives accompanied by their margins of error and that those margins of error ranged from about 2% to about 5%.Compare that 44,999,900% error that creationists actually need with the less than 1% error that their claims would actually buy them. Borrowing from the camel-and-needle metaphor, they are trying to open a millimeter wide crack of lack of total certainty in order to slip an adult blue whale through it. Ain't going to work.