Summations Only

There is no evidence for a young earth. None. You have presented none because there is none.ALL the evidence provided by geology, palaeontology, archaeology, radiological dating, dendrology, molecular biology and cosmology - amongst several other disciplines - points to not just an old earth but a VERY old earth. This has been studied extensively, painstakingly and globally for over 200 years by thousands of specialists. It is now a scientific fact that will not change.Had your book of ancient myths never been written this convestation would not be happening. What you mean by all the other evidence is your interpretation of those myths and nothing else.

I suppose you must believe that, but given that you've been presented with all thes multiple sources of independent evidence many hundreds of times it's difficult for me to believe that you actually do. The word delusion isn't strong enough for your sort of illness. Well you've got me there - can you explain how strata can be disturbed before it's laid down?Or are you making the silly mistake of saying that there is no disturbance in any individual strata or sets of strata?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It perpetual groundhog day here at EVC; like you just arrived today and haven't heard every one of these facts hundreds, if not thousands, of times.The evidential facts hit your wall of disbelief and bounce right off leaving you totally imune to them, so regardless of the evidence you immediately reject, then forget it.Let's ignore all the other evidence from all the other sciences for the moment and just take the direct evidence of radiometric dating. Note that I say 'direct'. It doesn't depend on any 'historic' science, it's experimental and confirmable today.Historically you've run away from this quite obviously because you know it's compelling on its own. But maybe now's the time you put your self-assessed critical thinking skills to the test.

quote:

---

The ages of Earth and Moon rocks and of meteorites are measured by the decay of long-lived radioactive isotopes of elements that occur naturally in rocks and minerals and that decay with half lives of 700 million to more than 100 billion years to stable isotopes of other elements. These dating techniques, which are firmly grounded in physics and are known collectively as radiometric dating, are used to measure the last time that the rock being dated was either melted or disturbed sufficiently to rehomogenize its radioactive elements.

​

Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents. The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga) and the Isua Supracrustal rocks in West Greenland (3.7 to 3.8 Ga), but well-studied rocks nearly as old are also found in the Minnesota River Valley and northern Michigan (3.5-3.7 billion years), in Swaziland (3.4-3.5 billion years), and in Western Australia (3.4-3.6 billion years). [See Editor's Note.]

​

These ancient rocks have been dated by a number of radiometric dating methods and the consistency of the results give scientists confidence that the ages are correct to within a few percent. An interesting feature of these ancient rocks is that they are not from any sort of "primordial crust" but are lava flows and sediments deposited in shallow water, an indication that Earth history began well before these rocks were deposited.

​

In Western Australia, single zircon crystals found in younger sedimentary rocks have radiometric ages of as much as 4.3 billion years, making these tiny crystals the oldest materials to be found on Earth so far. The source rocks for these zircon crystals have not yet been found. The ages measured for Earth's oldest rocks and oldest crystals show that the Earth is at least 4.3 billion years in age but do not reveal the exact age of Earth's formation. The best age for the Earth (4.54 Ga) is based on old, presumed single-stage leads coupled with the Pb ratios in troilite from iron meteorites, specifically the Canyon Diablo meteorite. In addition, mineral grains (zircon) with U-Pb ages of 4.4 Ga have recently been reported from sedimentary rocks in west-central Australia.

​

The Moon is a more primitive planet than Earth because it has not been disturbed by plate tectonics; thus, some of its more ancient rocks are more plentiful. Only a small number of rocks were returned to Earth by the six Apollo and three Luna missions. These rocks vary greatly in age, a reflection of their different ages of formation and their subsequent histories. The oldest dated moon rocks, however, have ages between 4.4 and 4.5 billion years and provide a minimum age for the formation of our nearest planetary neighbor.

​

Thousands of meteorites, which are fragments of asteroids that fall to Earth, have been recovered. These primitive objects provide the best ages for the time of formation of the Solar System. There are more than 70 meteorites, of different types, whose ages have been measured using radiometric dating techniques. The results show that the meteorites, and therefore the Solar System, formed between 4.53 and 4.58 billion years ago.

​

The best age for the Earth comes not from dating individual rocks but by considering the Earth and meteorites as part of the same evolving system in which the isotopic composition of lead, specifically the ratio of lead-207 to lead-206 changes over time owing to the decay of radioactive uranium-235 and uranium-238, respectively. Scientists have used this approach to determine the time required for the isotopes in the Earth's oldest lead ores, of which there are only a few, to evolve from its primordial composition, as measured in uranium-free phases of iron meteorites, to its compositions at the time these lead ores separated from their mantle reservoirs.

​

These calculations result in an age for the Earth and meteorites, and hence the Solar System, of 4.54 billion years with an uncertainty of less than 1 percent. To be precise, this age represents the last time that lead isotopes were homogeneous througout the inner Solar System and the time that lead and uranium was incorporated into the solid bodies of the Solar System. The age of 4.54 billion years found for the Solar System and Earth is consistent with current calculations of 11 to 13 billion years for the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (based on the stage of evolution of globular cluster stars) and the age of 10 to 15 billion years for the age of the Universe (based on the recession of distant galaxies).

​

For additional information on this subject, see G. Brent Dalrymple's The Age of the Earth, published by the Stanford University Press (Stanford, Calif.) in 1991 (492 p.).

---

Sure, Christianity is your flexible friend; it changes what it believes when it can't sustain its myths any longer. And bit by bit they're turning to nice squidgy liberal mush. Thank god.

Some parts die, some parts change and some parts stay the same. Hilariously a king changed it overnight beacuse the version in force at the time didn't suit him. The fact that it does change tells you a lot about the belief - ie that it's all made up. People notice.

I started something very similar a while backEvC Forum: Catholics are making it up.

The order in the fossil record can be proved Faith.You can see it yourself. You can study the rocks and fossils either directly or by reading the science. The evidence is so strong that one of the more iconic disproofs of evolution is finding fossils out of order. If the fissils are not ordered you should be able to produce literally thousands out of the claimed order.This is like radiometric dating isn't it Faith. Facts that can't be refuted that prove something that you can't let yourself think about.

So where's the problem Faith? Order is very easy to both show or show lacking. All you and your creationist buddies have to do is take the order as presented by science and show it to be wrong. If what you say is true, it should be really, really easy.

I have no problem at all with this obvious point.Science says there is an order in the fossil record, you say it's random. One side is right and the other wrong. This is a matter of fact not argument.In the sequence123456789I claim order. I say that order is shown becase each successive number exceeds the last by 1. It is not random. This is random622498251You can easily see it's random compared to the previous sequence.So instead of claiming randomness, just prove it. It should be easy. Find the tens of thousands of metaphorical rabbits. Or just a dozen or so. Where's the problem?

Here's a very simplified picture of how the scientific criteria has observed and recorded order in the fossil record. All you have to do is find a handful of, well any animal and plant group really, in a different order and you've disproven evolution and great lumps of geology. Can you do that? If there is no order - if it's random - this should be really easy to do.

Science disagrees with you so perhaps you're wrong? But just in case thousands of scientists are wrong, why don't you have a go at doing that? But you said there was no order, or even order. Order is order Faith - there's no confusion about it. If you say there's no order you also have to say - and demonstrate using the observations available - that order is not present. I've read that three times. It contains no meaning.The predictable appearance of fossils in predictable levels of, presumably, geology IS order.You can predict that the appearance of fossils will be random across geological levels - and that would mean no order - but that is observably false. The existance of Linnaean groupings - as you put it - IS the order. If the animals and plants appearing in the geology was not possible to put into groupings - or clades and nested heirarchies - we would see that nad there would be no order. But we see that animals and plants can be grouped and that those groups are not scattered randomly across geology. We NEVER find a mammal (or any other organism) where it couldn't be if there was no order.But as you know that you are right, I'm sure you will be able to do it. Maybe right after you've put us right on radiometric dating. (Which confirms the order independently.)

What on this blessed earth makes you think we can't show relatedness of fossils and order in the fossil record? There's a whole biological discipline devoted to it, it's called palaeontology. The mere fact that I can show you the diagram is the proof of it.Underpinning the diagram is a couple of hundred years of painstaking research which you can read. You can see the fossils and study the science. It's all there for you to prove wrong - in fact.That's fact, not rhetoric and semantics. Tangible fact. You can personally touch these things. You can order them yourself or find no order. Over to you. But you have to either do the work or point us to where the work has been done. You simply saying that there is no order is utterly pointless; not worth the pixels.

Right so after all that you now say that there IS order. The fossils are not distributed randomly across the geological record. Can you please remember this. It does mean that, but for the moment that aspect can be set aside. Except for you arguing the exact opposite. There are things that link them. It HAS to be true that the layers on the bottom are older than the layers on the top even if you think that the bottom layer is 1 day older than the flood and the top 365 days. But you have accepted that specific fossils are found only in spevific layers. Regardless of evolution you have no method of sorting those fossils into the 'static' order you now accept. In your 'model, the fossils should either be randomly distributed throughout the geology or the big heavy fossils should be at the bottom of the stack and the small light ones at the top. That's how particles settle in water. Well now you're changing the subject. The fossils are not randomly distributed across the geological record and you have no way of explaining that order. Biology does. It says that the fossils are found in the layers of geology where they lived. Not a surprising or magical idea.Not only that, science has methods of dating those layers and it can show beyond doubt that the layers on the top are younger than the layers on the bottom. Again not a surprising or magical finding.Now if your beliefs were true and this flood of yours scoured the planet of sediment and rock and churned it all up then allowed it to settle again, we'd find rocks of different ages scattered randomly throughout the geological column wouldn't we? Even with vertical separation the same size rock particles in each layer would have different dates. But they don't. Not only are the fossils in a definitive order but so is the geology. Note that you don't have to believe that the dating methods are accurate, just that they have relative consistency.None of that involves showing increasing complexity across the geological record, just that specific groups of fossils are found in specific groups of rocks and that this order is not random or coincidental. Science understands the mechanisms that created this order, your religious beliefs can not.In fact your religious beliefs require a completely different set of findings than the ones we actually observe.

To get back to this part of the order issue. You've now accepted that the fossils are in the geological record in a non-random way and that the rocks themselves are non-randomly organised.Science also predicts the order that fossils will appear in the rocks in this non-random way. It say that the oldest will be found in the lowest layers and that single celled organisms will appear first, followed by multi-cellular marine invertebrates, followed by fish, followed by amphibians, followed by reptiles, and then birds and mammals. That's because life evolved in that order.So that's three consistent non-random orders any of which you can disprove by real life observations.So why has this never been disproven?

God stopped making rocks after the flood apparently.