Abnormal Interests

That's a chicken/egg example though. When your actual belief is based on pseudoscience (aka Intelligent Design) why not believe you can date something using the same fake science. In fact, intelligent design itself is so illogical, that some of them believe that God created the earth 10,000 years ago, and then decided to let evolution (degradation, etc.) exist afterwards, for some reason to be explained later.

Also, the strangest part of that biblical belief is that it is barely biblical. Being Jewish, I can't say I've actually given a good, hard look at the new testament, but a friend of mine showed me a passage that said "A day in the life of God is like 1,000 years" and the statement was in no way directly related to the start of the universe. So taken out of context you can SAY that the 6 days of creation were 1,000 years each, but then you assume that all civization started 4,000 years ago. And since there is also no actual such thing as a year, none of it makes sense. But I guess that's how it's so easy to believe. If you can't understand it, how can you disprove it?

Of course some of us "believe Scripture" and believe that the earth was formed 4.5 Billion (or whatever) years ago. We just don't accept that Scripture teaches anything about the age of the earth (indeed it would be hard to find any passage in Scripture that seems intended to teach about any scientific question at all)!

Actually, the billion year old dates were established in the mid 19th century - a hundred years before the dating methods were invented. By the early 1950's (when my father took his geology classes), a very nice, neat package was concocted based on a complete vacuum of data. It is the usual intellectual malpractice.

Looney, as far as I can find nowone in the 19th century thought the earth was older than 55 million years old. Lord Kelvin (1862) calculated that the earth solidified from a molten state 98 million years ago. He latter (1897) changed is estimate to 20-40 million years ago. As far as I can tell, he did not estimate the actual age of the earth. Charles D. Walcott calculated the age of the earth, based on the grain sizes of the sediments at 55 million years in 1893. There is nothing to recommend his method today. In 1921, Henry Russell calculated a maximum age for the earth at eight billion based on estimates of its total uranium and lead content. His estimate was nearly double what is now know from radiometric measurements but it was not something he pulled out of his ear either. But in 1941, Gerling, using a Pb-Pb method developed by Alfred Nier, lowered the estimate to 3.2 million years. This would account for what you father was taught. Improved methods have, over the years, produced improved results. If you know the name of a scientist, living in the 19th century, who thought the earth older than 55 million years old, please give me a reference. I'd like to look it up. If you are truly interested in the history of various efforts to date the earth you might checkout this link

According to my Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1910:

"Geologists were for many years in the habit of believing that no limit could be assigned to the antiquity of the planet, and that they were at liberty to make unlimited drafts on the ages of the past. In 1862 and subsequent years, however, Lord Kelvin ..."

I can continue on, but this was the state of geology and the intellectual climate BEFORE Darwin's Origin of Species was written. The large dates are all in here.

My father was taught in extraordinary detail regarding the sequence of events that resulted in the geological features that are observed, as well as those which are not observed - in the early 1950's.

Our modern science is based on 19th century pronouncements that were based only on a desperate need to contradict the Bible.

Tim,

I'm sorry I didn't address your concern earlier. You are of course correct and I should have said, "believe scripture the way Dr. Ross's believes scripture." Now it is another question as to what if anything the Hebrew Bible says about the age of the earth. Part of me wants to agree with you but part of me thinks the fundamentalist reading is more correct than wrong. You are certainly correct that the Bible knows nothing of what we call science and therefore it is unreasonable to ask scientific questions of it.

Yeah, - you could look at it like that. On the other hand, it should be fair for a guy to be able to say, "Look, I know all of their proofs for their theory of evolution and I still believe in a young Earth". And the only way that someone can actually make that claim without being laughed off the stage is if he is not an autodidact but a bona fide PhD in geoscience.

If he were anything but - you'd dismiss him as an ignoramous. Now you can't quite do that. Sure, you can dismiss him as a man with religious conviction that overtakes all logic in the same manner as any defense attorney (or mother, for that matter) views the obviously guilty as innocent - but ignorance of the facts is something he most certainly can not be charged with.

Could you not see a reform-minded muslim man become a scholar and a cleric under the same pretenses?

In a very personal way, I can.

mnuez

Mnuez,

First, I do not dismiss him as an ignominious and I think he does have a bona fide PhD in geoscience. My remarks about radiographic dating were aimed at the headline writer. I think Ross as a scientist is a phony or perhaps Ross believes that god somehow manipulated the decay rates to fool us and even test our faith. If this is a test of faith, I failed miserably.

Duane, it is nothing to do with the decay rates or the measurements, but rather the wild-eyed assumptions that were based on extrapolations of speculations on the starting conditions. Thus, we have a catalog of dating methods. If we need an old date, then we use an old date method. If we need a young date (on the same rock), then we use a young date method. It is all worthless and has nothing to do with real science.

Looney, assuming I have a rock that has been dated to 3.8 BYBP using, say, the Pb-Pb method. What exact method should I use to show that this same rock or one form the same stratum is less than 10,000 years old? If your answer involves a different way of understanding the Pb-Pb results, please outline exactly how you would get such a recent date from the Pb-Pb results.

First law of engineering: "Thou shalt not extrapolate".

Your entire science paradigm is wrong.