Age Correlations and An Old Earth, Version 2 No 1

I don't know whether this had been covered yet, especially since this is a second version of the topic, but do the readers know the significance of correlations?Mind you, I'm drawing from the statistics classes I took for my Applied Math Bachelor's from 30 years ago. When you take a data sample from a population of data points, there's an interval of confidence, which basically is the probability that your sample is indeed representative of the population being sampled. Correlation is when you take a number of different independent samplings that agree with the other samplings.An interval of confidence is given as a probability, which by definition ranges from greater than zero to less than one (since zero is absolute impossibility and 1 is total inevitability), hence it ranges exclusively from zero to one (ie, between, but not including zero and one). Admittedly, after all this time I've forgotten precise nomenclature and undoubtedly have merged in Boolean Algebra, but when you AND independent probabilities together, you do so by multiplying them together. Whenever you multiply together two positive factors that are less than one, the product is always less than either factor.OK, an example to demonstrate the principle. Let's say you have a sampling whose interval of confidence is 90% (most are 95% or greater). Then you take another independent sampling that's also 90%. Taken together, their correlation is 0.9 * 0.9, which is 0.89. And a third correlation with the same interval of confidence would be 0.729. And a fourth would be 0.6561. and so on.Or perhaps a better illustration would be one of the weakest of the plethora of weak creationist probability arguments. This one posited coin flips, a sequence of one million coin flips from amoeba to man. Of course, the first less obvious problem with this model is its implicit requirement that each and every step had to succeed; many steps could not advance and then eventually advance -- for a much better model of stasis/advancing/backsliding refer to my MONKEY implementation of Dawkins' WEASEL, complete with mathematical analysis. The probability of getting heads in a coin toss, ignoring biasing from the unequal distribution of mass in a coin, is 50%, 0.5. Getting heads twice is 0.5², which is 0.25. The formula is P=pⁿ, so 0.5^1,000,000 is ... . Well, Window's calc refuses to work with those figures, but it turns out to be extremely small, well past the point of virtual impossibility.Of course, that particular "model" is fatally flawed (especially since it doesn't actually model anything), but the illustrative point remains that the probability of several independent things all being true is the product of all their individual probabilities. And as we factor them all together, the overall probability diminishes rapidly.OK, here's how this relates to correlations. What's the probability that any one independent set of data is correct? 90% to 95% with the higher figure being more likely, so let's choose 95%. What's the probability that ten independent sets of data are correct? 0.95¹⁰ or 59.87%. That twenty independent sets of data are correct? 35.85%. That thirty independent sets of data are correct? 21.464%.So out of pure chance, what is the probability that several sets of independent data should agree with each other? An increasingly small probability. But what do we observe instead? All these different independent sets of data agree with each other. What are the odds of that? That is why correlations are so important. There is a possibility that they could all just by chance agree with each other, but we are able to calculate the probability of that happening. And we can clearly see that that probability becomes vanishingly small. And yet despite those odds all those correlations come up with the same answer. Which lends strength to their all pointing to the same truth.

According to my earlier reading a couple decades ago, fluctuations in the strength of the geo-magnetic field also affect the production of C-14 in the atmosphere. A few thousand years ago, the field was weaker (contrary to another common creationist claim) so there was more C-14 being produced. This caused radio-carbon dates from that time to falsely appear younger (not, again contrary to common creationist claims, older), as was determined by historical accounts. As I gathered, it was mainly this problem that led to the development of dendrochronological calibration tables as you described.Ironically, a creationist on CompuServe in 1990 brought up this very point, but tried to claim that the excess in C-14 caused the dates to come out older, whereas if he had any understanding at all of the method he would have realized that caused false-young results instead, but then his own wishful thinking got in his way (http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/points23.html). In a similar piece of irony, in response to "John Woodmorappe's" cherry-picked list of 350 radio-dates that were 20% or more off, Glenn R. Morton plotted them on a graph and found that the majority of those dates were too young, not too old as the purpose of the creationist claims require them to be (http://home.entouch.net/dmd/age.htm).

Certainly, the official creationist line is an age for the earth that is no greater than 10,000 years, even though the Ussher reckoning would require it to be no older than 6,000 years. I've always assumed, since "creation science" had to play the game of "Hide the Bible" in order to deceive the court system, that they just rounded up in order to hide their source.And, certainly, while most creationists would be expected to just blindly follow the official creationist line that they've been fed, there should be and are variant views on that particular question. And, certainly, when those variant views present themselves, we quite naturally want to ask how those variant views had been arrived at.So then, please, on what do you base your one-million-year maximum age? Is it a variation of the two-hundred-year-old Gap Theory? And if, in differing from the clear genealogies used by Ussher, one million years is not out of line, then what about two million years? Or a hundred million years? Or a billion years? Or about 4.5 billion years? What is it that draws the line in the sand at one million years?About 20 years ago on a Yahoo Groups forum, a creationist gave me two aha! epiphanies. The first was when he used that hoary old PRATT about the concentration of sodium in the oceans (the old sea salt concentrations claim, which actually deals with residence times for various elements and compounds; aluminum's is 100 years, but instead of trying to claim that the seas could be no older than 100 years, Henry Morris just wrote something like "Huh? I wonder what that would mean."). Now, this creationist had already demonstrated before that he toed the party line of no older than 10,000 years, but here he was arguing for millions of years instead. When I pointed out to him that he was contradicting himself, he said that he did not care whether it was 10,000 years or a hundred million years, "just so long as it's not BILLIONS OF YEARS as science says it is". That is when I had one of the epiphanies he gave me: creationists don't care what any of their claims really mean, just so long as they can disprove or cast doubt on what science says; they're not trying to prove or promote creationism, but rather they're just attacking science.So then, do you actually have a reason for setting the limit at one million years? Or are you just allowing for more age, just so long as it's less than what science says?BTW, FWIW, I'm sure that we've all played that rainy-day game of working through the genealogies in Genesis; I certainly did. But then we bump right up against the Flood and can't go any further (much like blacks in the US trying to trace their families back eventually hit the Wall of Slavery beyond which regular genealogy records were normally not kept). But I read one creationist's newsletter where he used other verses, including the reigns of the kings, to eventually tie the Bible's chronologies to an actual historic event and thus came up with a biblical date for Creation, which is only about 424 years older than the Jewish calendar says.I converted it into a web page and had posted it on my previous website, but haven't prepared it for my current site. I just now uploaded it, though, but all the links in it are broken or lead to elsewhere. No other web page anywhere links to it. Just thought it might be an interesting read for you and for others. ARE THERE GAPS IN THE GENEALOGIES IN DETERMINING WHEN ADAM LIVED?Share and enjoy!Edited by dwise1, : had forgotten to provide the link

We even saw CRR doing that in the Flat Earth discussion (see Message 96) in how he took a Neil deGrasse Tyson statement of simple ballistics kinematics and kept throwing in factors and twisting them about in order to conclude: IOW, their goal is not to discover nor learn nor understand anything, but rather to discredit science in any way possible, no matter how insignificantly or how many contortions they have to go through or how many lies they have to throw in. The purpose of their evolutions (Navy-speak) is to enable them to cherry-pick from science, such that they feel free to reject what they believe conflicts with their theology while keeping those parts of science that brings them their computers and flush toilets.But their evolutions also serve to demonstrate that YEC is false. Recent discussions in the attempts to explain the scientific method to PorknCheese brought up the point that one of the purposes for forming hypotheses is to construct test cases for testing a theory. You form an explanation for something (in science AKA "theory") but you need to test it. So you use the theory to generate hypotheses, which are basically predictions of what should happen, and then you see if they are correct.So when creationists come up with a "what if" as an "alternative explanation", that gives us something that we can test. And unsurprisingly, all their "alternative explanations" have failed those tests. All of which demonstrate that YEC is false.Back in 1984 I heard Dr. Gish claim that philosopher of science Larry Laudan agreed with him about Judge Overton's decision in the 1981 Arkansas trial. I wrote to the ICR and Gish sent me a copy of the article. Apparently Gish had not read the entire article, which condemned "creation science" in very strong terms -- from Science at the Bar -- Causes for Concern by Larry Laudan, Science, Technology and Human Values 7, no. 41 (1982):16-19 (my emphasis added):

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At various key points in the Opinion, Creationism is charged with being untestable, dogmatic (and thus non-tentative), and unfalsifiable. All three charges are of dubious merit. For instance, to make the interlinked claims that Creationism is neither falsifiable nor testable is to assert that Creationism makes no empirical assertions whatever. This is surely false. Creationists make a wide range of testable assertions about empirical matters of fact.

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Thus, as Judge Overton himself grants (apparently without seeing its implications), the creationists say that the earth is of very recent origin (say 6,000 to 20,000 years old); they argue that most of the geological features of the earth's surface are diluvial in character (i.e., products of the postulated worldwide Noachian deluge); they are committed to a large number of factual historical claims with which the Old Testament is replete; they assert the limited variability of species. They are committed to the view that, since animals and man were created at the same time, the human fossil record must be paleontologically co-extensive with the record of lower animals. It is fair to say that no one has shown how to reconcile such claims with the available evidence -- evidence which speaks persuasively to a long earth history, among other things.

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In brief, these claims are testable, they have been tested, and they have failed those tests.

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Actually, yes. That's been the goal of "creation science" all along. Well, actually the initial goal of "creation science" was to deliberately deceive the courts and the general public, but then the creationist community that had created it got suckered in and deceived as well. So then that's been its goal ever since the creationists fell for it.They falsely believe that science is at war against God, so they must wage war against science. However, they are also fully aware of the physical benefits we have derived from science and technology (eg, electricity, computers, Internet, cars, flush toilets) and that they do not want to lose.The science that they want to have is a cafeteria variety, one in which they can cherry-pick what they want and ignore what they don't like. After all, isn't that how they approach the Bible, cherry-picking out of context what they like while ignoring what they don't like? Some creationists have even started a campaign to change science, such as the Discovery Institute and its Wedge Document.So then, yes, they do want an alternative science. One that is useless for learning anything about the universe, but solely useful for assuaging their own fears as it supports their lies.

Really? Walt Brown? At least he is not as pathetic as Kent Hovind.However, Walt Brown is proven to deliberately lie. That is to say that he tells lies with full knowledge that they are lies.I retell the story here on my "Bullfrog Affair" page. Brown would use the claim that a study comparing the same protein between different species showed that "rattlesnake's closest biochemical relative is humans". Keep that specific wording in mind.The story on my page (extra emphasis added at the end):

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One of Brown's claims that Arduini was especially interested in was that the rattlesnake's closest biochemical relative is humans. However, Brown
demanded $70 from Arduini to provide that documentation.

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Robert Kenney of Chicago fared somewhat better. . . .

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Then in the Summer of 1984, Kenney wrote to Walter Brown about the fetal horse hemoglobin. Brown responded with a telephone call. Kenney tried to get Brown to confirm or deny the ICR's claims, or at least to pressure the ICR to produce some kind of documentation. Brown refused, but instead offered another claim: rattlesnake proteins.

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Brown claimed that on the basis of data from a 1978 study by Margaret Dayhoff, comparisons of cytochrome c show that the rattlesnake is more closely related to humans that to any other organism. When Kenney asked Brown to provide the name of the scientific journal and the page number in which Dayhoff had reached this conclusion, Brown stated that he couldn't. Dayhoff had never reached such a conclusion, but rather Brown's son had used Dayhoff's data to reach that conclusion for a science fair project. It was Brown's son who had concluded that rattlesnakes are more closely related to humans by cytochrome c than to any other organism.

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For fifteen dollars, Brown sent Kenney photocopies of his son's project (apparently, Brown's price depends on who you are). Kenney wrote:

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"In the project I quickly found that the rattlesnake and humans differed by only fourteen amino acids. Humans and rhesus monkeys differed by one amino acid. Later, Brown called me again and then explained that of the forty-seven organisms in the study, the one closest to the RATTLESNAKE was the human, not that the one closest to the human was the rattlesnake. You see, among the forty-seven there were no other snakes." (CEN Vol.4 No.5 Sep/Oct 84, pg 16)

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Most of the other organisms in the study were as distantly related to the rattlesnake as were humans; it is coincidence that human cytochrome c was just barely less different than the others. Obviously, this is just semantic sleight-of-hand which can serve no other purpose than to mislead and it is so blatant that Brown had to know what he was doing.

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Later after a debate, Kenney found Brown telling a small group about rattlesnakes being more closely related to humans than to any other organism. When Kenney started explaining to the group how misleading that was, Brown quickly changed the subject.

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The hard requirement to word the claim just right is the first tell. If you present it one way ("the rattlesnake is more closely related to humans that to any other organism"), then you could still claim to be technically correct. But if you present it any other way (eg, that humans are more closely related to the rattlesnake than to any other organism) then you would be completely wrong. Rhesus monkeys were also in that study and they differed from humans by only one amino acid. Chimpanzees were not included in that study, but other studies consistently show that there is no difference in the cytochrome c proteins of humans and chimpazees; they are identical.But what proves beyond a doubt that Walt Brown deliberately lied is how he handled that incident after that debate. He knew full well that he was lying to those people.Again, in Christian doctrine is God supposed to be served and supported by lies and deception? Not in any Christian doctrine that I had ever learned. What I had always seen Christian doctrine teach is that lies and deception serve the Prince of Lies, the Deceiver, Satan.Of course, if you truly believe that God is to be served by lies and deception, then do please explain that to us.BTW, Walt Brown is also to blame for that other stupid "creation science" claim about the rate at which the earth's rotation is slowing down. In 1979 he published his claim based on leap seconds, where had suddenly become big news because of the upcoming GPS system (GPS time started 1980 Jan 06, while the system went on-line around 1986). He grossly misunderstood what leap seconds are and what they do, so he ended up with a deceleration rate hundreds of times too great. That claim was soundly refuted in 1982. Some time after that Walt Brown appears to have dropped that claim, but the creationist community continues to push that false claim even after you prove to them how false it is.For the record, a few years ago I searched through Walt Brown's on-line book for both claims. I could not find any trace of the leap second claim, but the rattlesnake protein claim was still there albeit as a half-cryptic footnote.Again, do please explain to us why you creationists believe so strongly that God must be served through lies and deception.Edited by dwise1, : new subtitle

What is your source for that utterly false and ridiculous supposition? Seriously, which creationist was it who made that up and what did he claim as his source? (Typically, creationists will claim a scientific source as their own source, when actually they just took the claim directly from another creationist, claimed scientific source and all, while deliberately lying about what their source was.)The year has never ever been 360 days long, but it will be some time in the future. The earth's rotation is slowing down on the whole, currently at an average rate of about 2 milliseconds per day per century. Hence the earth had a more rapid rotation in the past and will have a slower rotation in the future. A more rapid rotation would mean more days in a year, not fewer as you just claimed; eg, around 400 million years ago there would have been about 400 days in each year as verified by the varves in Devonian fossil coral reefs.So what is your source for that ridiculous false claim and why did you allow yourself to be deceived by it?

Oh, do you have any evidence of that?Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Please do present your evidence.Oh!!! No evidence? Gee!!!! Why are we not surprised in the least? What a bunch of fucking morons you all are!

Well, if the Bible says that the year is only 360 days long when it is actually in solid observable measurable fact (and well inside your fictitious "fishbowl") 365.2425 days long, then that proves conclusively and irrefutably that the Bible is in error! And according to fundamentalist Christian belief, finding even a single error in the Bible proves that the entire Bible is wrong.If I were CAPT Kirk and you were NOMAD, this would be the point where you would self-destruct ("Fulfill your prime directive!" "ERROR! ERROR! MUST STERILIZE! MUST STERILIZE!" from The Changeling).Thank you very much for proving the Bible wrong. Now maybe you idiot fundamentalists will finally re-evaluate your ridiculous and self-destructive belief that the Bible being wrong is proof that God does not exist.Edited by dwise1, : changed "within" to "inside"

Yes indeed! My position is that creationist claims must be truthful and honest and that the consequences of dishonest and false claims (including deliberate lies and deception) are the discrediting of Christianity and the loss of Christians' faith, as has been demonstrated many times. Most religious claims cannot be tested, but when the ones that we can test all turn out to be false, then there is no reason whatsoever for anyone to believe the claims that we cannot test. Your position is to make false claims about the real world and to claim that if those false claims do indeed turn out to be false (which they are) then God does not exist. IOW, your position is to disprove God. Within the context of Christian doctrine, you are serving Satan.In Message 834, you claim: Prove it! Present the actual verses which say that!Or are you also lying about what the Bible says?

It's even worse than that. Even when somebody else is doing that testing for them in order to find support for the claim, they aren't interested.Refer to Ed Babinski's article, Cretinism or Evilution? No. 3 : Men Over Ten Feet Tall (1996), in which he tried to work with Carl Baugh to research one of his claims. Baugh just handed him a "19th century photograph" (quite obviously a drawing by an artist with no understanding of light sources) that he had received from the then-late Clifford Burdick. When Babinski tried to work with Baugh in verifying this claim, Baugh showed no interest at all.Of course, the obvious reason why creationists won't test their ideas nor help others test them is because even they realize that those tests would expose their ideas as being utterly false.

No, you don't. The creationist position is that what God created cannot be right. The earth, which actual creationists believe God created, is ancient, but creationists insist that it is not. Creationists are saying that God is wrong! Furthermore, creationists insist that if the world is as it actually is (eg, ancient), then God does not exist. As a result, they must use endless lies in order to deny that the world is as God had created it.You deny God and God's Creation. What the hell is that supposed to mean? Could you please restate that in English instead of in gibberish?And while you are at it, do please describe to me exactly what it is that I believe. You obviously have no clue what you are babbling about. Then why do you insist that it was? Yet again: You keep blathering on about your imaginary 360-day year and you actually stated that it's in the Bible. SO SHOW US! Don't lie about it. Show us!

Bingo!Creationists keep claiming that the Bible does not contain any error and that if even a single error were to be found in the Bible, then the entire Bible is in error and completely false and it must be thrown into the dustbin (Br for "garbage can").Furthermore, they claim that if the Bible is not true then God does not exist (or alternatively that God is a Liar and must not be worshipped). Either way, they are taught that they must abandon their faith and become atheists (not real atheists, but rather the perverted Christian version).Additionally, they have made many false claims about the real world and have assigned those false claims the same inerrancy status as they have the Bible. Therefore, if they false claims about the real world are shown to be false, then that disproves the Bible which in turn disproves God.Obviously, the Bible is not completely devoid of errors. And obviously their false claims about the real world are false. They have booby-trapped their faith and then stumbled into their own traps.Or to put it into the terms that GDR offers, they are putting words into God's mouth, words that God never said and never would say.I do not believe any of that. I have a much more realistic understanding of the Bible. It obviously contains errors, but that has no bearing whatsoever on whether the rest of it is in error. That also had no bearing whatsoever on whether God exists or not. And false claims about the real world are just plain false and should not be used. Making one's faith dependent on those false claims about the real world can only result in driving everybody away from that false creationist theology.Creationists must examine what they believe in order to weed out false beliefs such as "creation science".Actual creationists (as opposed to faux creationists like creation) believe that God created that universe. Science studies how the universe works. Creationists claim that explanations using natural processes for how something works denies God, whereas actual creationists believe that God created those natural processes, including evolutionary processes. There is no conflict between divine Creation and science, including evolution.The only thing that causes any conflict with science is when creationists inject their false theology and false claims.

Bullshit! You obviously have no clue what correlations are nor why they are so important.In statistics class, we learned about the confidence interval. Every measurement and test has a figure of merit describing how confident we are that it is correct. That figure of merit, the confidence interval, is expressed as a probability of its being correct -- probabilities range from 0 (impossible) to 1.0 (dead certainty), which can also be represented as percentages from 0% to 100%. Common values for the confidence interval of reliable tests tend to range from 90% to 98%. Probabilities are normally annotated as p.Now for correlations, which are based on the joint probabilities of the confidence intervals of all the independent tests.Joint probabilities for independent tests are obtained by multiplying the component probabilities together. For example, flipping heads with a fair coin (a rare thing, actually, given the lopsided distribution of mass of most coins) n number of times. The probability of heads with a fair coin is 1/2 or 0.5, so the probability of n heads in a row is 0.5ⁿ. The probability of two heads in a row is 0.5² = 0.25. The probability of five heads in a row is 0.5⁵ = 0.03125. The probability of ten heads in a row is 0.5¹⁰ = 0.0009765625 = 9.765625×10^-4. The probability of fifty heads in a row is 0.5⁵⁰ = 8.882×10^-16. The probability of a hundred heads in a row is 0.5¹⁰⁰ = 7.8886×10^-31.Now let's try the probability of a confidence interval of an individual test being 95%. The probability of two tests giving the same results is 0.95² = 0.9025. The probability of five tests giving the same results is 0.95⁵ = 0.77378. The probability of ten tests giving the same results is 0.95¹⁰ = 0.5987. The probability of fifty tests giving the same results is 0.95⁵⁰ = 0.077. The probability of a hundred tests giving the same results is 0.95¹⁰⁰ = 0.00592. The probability of a thousand tests giving the same results is 0.95¹⁰⁰⁰ = 5.29×10^-23.Do you get the drift there? The probability of having more and more independent tests just happening to come up the same purely by chance becomes increasingly smaller regardless of how high the individual confidence interval is. So if independent test after independent test keeps coming up with the same results, the probability that those same results are completely due to pure chance becomes vanishingly small. That tells us that those results are significant. That tells us that we have a high level of confidence in the correlation of those results.Thousands of correlating results are extremely significant. You cannot just pooh-pooh them away out of pig ignorance. You must deal with them.

Bullshit! Explain in detail what is wrong with the math. Refer to your textbook from your statistics class.And while you are at it, you still have not provided any of the Bible verses that in Message 834 you claim show that the year is 360 days long; from my Message 875: If you are telling the truth, then providing that information should be trivially simple. If you are lying, then just admit it. If you have absolutely no clue what you are talking about and are just regurgitating crap fed to you by some creationist cretin, then admit it and identify that cretin.So far, all your actions have demonstrated that you are just yet another dishonest creationist troll. You are the wicked fruit described in the Matthew 7:20 Test which proves that your religion is a false religion that should be cut down and thrown into the fire.