Why can't evolution be part of god's plan?

[SmarterThanHick]

Again, you have no proof of things that happened 14 billion years ago. Some scientists can make educated guesses, but they cannot prove.

By that wonderful logic, you cannot prove something that happened 5 minutes ago. "Oh I'm sorry officer, you can't prove I just shot that person, even though I'm holding a smoking gun, and bullet in the person matches the bullets in this gun, and even though you found me cursing at him while standing over his lifeless body. no, you can't PROVE it, you can only make an educated guess".

What do you think PROOF is made of?

As for the dating of ages, I have simply pointed out there could be other explanations

False

that there is no way to confirm the dates

Also false.

How do you confirm any date? Ever? I would like to know how you even figure out what day of the week it is in your ridiculous narrow minded world. How do you know when the seasons change? How can we tell the age of trees?

This is not magic. It's not hocus pocus. It's verified factual evidence. Just because you aren't smart enough to have a basic understanding of the concepts doesn't mean they suddenly stop existing.

I can prove every single step along the way. You ready to learn or you want to stay blind?

All you have is a bunch of scientists that have samples of a small fraction of the earth's surface that were tested using tests that cannot be verified to validate explanations that sound similar to "magical nuclear faries" with a little bit of logic thrown in here and there.

Also false. We can verify every step along the way. We can in fact completely scrap all testing, start from scratch to recreate the analysis methods, and come to the exact conclusion. That's how science works - it's based on reproducible factual evidence, not passed down unreproducible questionable fables.

If all trace of knowledge were wiped off the face of the Earth, all current religions would be lost. New ones would probably arise, but not the same as what we have today. Science, however, will come back exactly the same. We will understand gravity and physics in the exact same way. We will gain the same insights into biology and chemistry and medicine - not because of some hokey conspiracy theory you seem to have fabricated - but because that's truly how the world works, whether you want to believe it or not.

If it isn't good for anything very old then what good is it?

Dating things that aren't that old? OK let me dumb this down for you. When you're young, you go to a pediatrician. Let's say that's equivalent to carbon dating. When you grow up, you go to an internist - that's like the older forms of radiometric dating. Each doctor (or test) excels in one particular age group. Therefore, we use the test that is most appropriate.

That's actually completely false, and another prime example of you literally making things up to suit your own needs

Did you read what I said or are you listening to your hick preachers?

Yes I did read it. What part of "that's actually completely false, and another prime example o you literally making things up" didn't you understand? I'm happy to clarify.

Is that why some results obtained from samples can be billions of years apart? Scientifically that type of error sucks!

I asked you for a source last time, and you have yet to provide any that actually supports what you're saying. I've read that theory before - it's all over christian websites, and it's all completely fabricated. IF you use the wrong dating test, you're can get differing numbers (which is why we don't use short acting radiometric testing for the distant past). But please, provide a single source that supports this claim.

I look forward to you ignoring everything I said, providing no supporting evidence, and going on with your ignorant uneducated posting spree.

I have now twice pointed out methods of dating verification to you. But by all means, continue clamping your hands over your ears, squeezing your eyes tightly shut, and singing "LA LA LA I Can't Hear You" to drown out any information that undermines your preferred worldview.

You have not pointed out, how most of that information can be proven or verified.

But I have, on more than one occasion. I will repeat myself here for your benefit.

Matter decays in a very specific predictable way: half-life degradation. After a certain amount of time, half of a given substance degrades into a different version of itself (called an isotope). We can very easily verify what proportion of a sample is the normal type, and which is a degraded isotope at any given time. Now the actual amount of time for half the substance to degrade varies from substance to substance.

Carbon, for example, has a half life of 5,700 years. Therefore, using it to determine something from millions of years ago is not very accurate. For that reason, scientists use other materials, such as uranium to thorium (half life 80,000 years) or potassium to argon (1.3 billion years). That is to say, it takes uranium 80,000 years for half of a sample to decay into thorium.

So when a scientist looks at a sample, they look to see what proportion or the original material is still around, and what amount decayed. From that, and with knowledge of that material's half life, they can easily calculate the age of that object. Questions?

I have demonstrated that your "science" is a belief in what "scientists" say. They have no way to verify their explanations are correct.

False. Science has nothing to do with faith. It's about evidence, and the unbiased search for truth.

So science designed tests verify science designed tests? The "tests" can be calibrated to verify the ''scientists" beliefs.

Where are the witnesses?

As he just mentioned, we are all witnesses. These tests can be performed any given day of the week. We can start from scratch and understand the logic from the ground up. These tests follow the same creed as those that you rely on for your health - the ones that tell you whether you have cancer, tuberculosis, or HIV. You don't question a single one of those tests, but the ones you don't want to believe are somehow based on faith? That's quite hypocritical.

 

[THE LIGHT]

Dating things that aren't that old? OK let me dumb this down for you. When you're young, you go to a pediatrician. Let's say that's equivalent to carbon dating. When you grow up, you go to an internist - that's like the older forms of radiometric dating. Each doctor (or test) excels in one particular age group. Therefore, we use the test that is most appropriate.

Um how do you know which one to use?

 

[THE LIGHT]

Did you actually read ANYTHING he just typed? Or did you just blindly skip ahead and point out the ignorant hick thing your uneducated preacher told you as to how you should respond to dating techniques? Of course carbon dating isn't good for things that old. That's why he overviewed the OTHER dating methods used that are VERY accurate for those age groups.

If it isn't good for anything very old then what good is it?

For dating things that aren't that old. The fact that that required explanation at all... again... should be all the indication you need that you are way out of your depth discussing this topic.

Please, please go actually learn something about the subject.

This is the brain evolution gave me. So what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

 

[THE LIGHT]

Yes I did read it. What part of "that's actually completely false, and another prime example o you literally making things up" didn't you understand? I'm happy to clarify.

and a cow jumped over the moon too eh? Try reading it again with an open mind. And forget everything your atheistic propoganda websites have told you just for a split second. Then you can go back to being ignorant if you so choose.

I asked you for a source last time, and you have yet to provide any that actually supports what you're saying. I've read that theory before - it's all over christian websites, and it's all completely fabricated. IF you use the wrong dating test, you're can get differing numbers (which is why we don't use short acting radiometric testing for the distant past). But please, provide a single source that supports this claim.

You would throw the source out just like you evolutionists throw the scientific results out.

 

[SmarterThanHick]

Um how do you know which one to use?

Good question. This process is a one way street. Shorter half lives aren't that great at dating really really old things. However, longer half lives can date older and newer objects. Imagine you have a substance that has a half life of 100 years, and you wanted to date something that's one million years old. That's a LOT of half-lives to get through, and it would be hard to determine timing based on the miniscule amount of the undegraded substance (which is why short half lives for old things can vary). But let's say you have a substance with a half life of one billion years. Well now that million-year old object isn't so bad - not even half of the substance is decayed yet, and so we have an accurate and reproducible measure of the proportions. Think of it as "longer the half life, the longer the range".

So when we talk about checking out dinosaurs, we use large half lives. When we try to date some random buried industrial building foundation that someone discovered in America, we can just use carbon dating.

This is the brain evolution gave me. So what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

A ton of evidence that supports his answer, and nothing supporting yours.

 

[Father Time]

I fail to see the humor. I'm just going to take that as a "you start" since you apear unwilling to do anything actually involving the evidence in your response.

How about we begin with basic principles of radiometric dating? Fortunately I've had to explain this to people before so I have most of this stuff written already.

Carbon (C14) Dating:

C14 dating is used to date the remains of organic, air breathing organisms up to approximately 50,000 years old. While living these organisms breathe the atmosphere, which contains trace amounts of the radioactive isotope Carbon 14 that is constantly being produced in the upper atmosphere through neutron bombardment. So long as they are alive the C14 content of their bodies will remain in equilibrium with the C14 content of the atmosphere. When they die respiration ceases, along with the intake of any new quantities of C14. Over time the C14 decays with a half-life of 5568 years into N14. By measuring how much C14 remains un-decayed the time elapsed since the death of the organism can be determined.

A common mi-sperception of C14 dating is that it relies on the assumption that atmospheric C14 levels remained constant in the past so that we can know how much C14 an organism started off with. While this was an assumption made when the technique was first developed about half a century ago it has not been the case for several decades. Historical atmospheric C14 concentrations have been charted and calibrated using both dendochronology and lake varves which incorporate organic sediment in their annual deposition layers. One particularly good example of this is Lake Suigetsu in Japan where cores have been drilled to a depth of 45,000 annual layers. Because of the layering process we have an independent count of exactly how old every layer is… and because the layers incorporate organic material (the remains of a surface algae which dies off every year and sinks to the bottom of the lake) each layer can be C14 dated as well, and using these two data points the atmospheric C14 content can be charted all the way back for the entire time span encompassed by the varve core. This data (cross-checked against multiple other sites and methods) then allows us to apply C14 dating to other sites already knowing how fluctuations in atmospheric C14 concentrations in the past will effect the results… and allowing us to calibrate out error that would otherwise be introduced due to those past fluctuations.

Just one more note on C14 dating... once this calibration scale was applied it was discovered that previous C14 dates had been underestimating ages. By a few percent. There are also the occasional examples of C14 dates which have supposedly been wildly inaccurate. Many of these examples are the result of grossly improper applications of the method. For example, one I have encountered quite often is the "C14 dating of a living snail shell" that came back as thousands of years old... I believe this is one of Hovind's pet illustrations. The mollusks in question were extremely inappropriate subjects for C14 dating, which anyone familiar with the method would know. They form shells which are in equilibrium with the carbon content of the water sources in which they live... NOT the atmosphere. No C14 lab worth it's salt would ever date such an organism without warning the person requesting the test of the reservoir effect that would most likely render the test results invalid.

Longer Ranged Radiometric Dating:

There are a great many longer ranged radiometric dating methods using radioactive isotopes with longer half-lives than C14. I’ll quickly review a couple of them.

1. Argon-Argon (Ar40-Ar39) dating. Argon-Argon is a method closely related to Potassium-Argon, where the age of a sample is determined by measurement of how much of the potassium-40 in the rock has decayed into Argon-40. However, with the Argon-Argon method it is also possible to tell if there is any Argon-40 present which is NOT a product of the decay of the potassium in the sample. This is done by placing the sample to be dated in close proximity to a nuclear reactor for several hours. The resulting neutron bombardment from the reactor causes potassium-39 in the sample to be transformed into Argon-39. Argon-39 has a half-life of only 269 years, and is not found in nature… so any subsequently detected argon-39 is known to be a product of the decay of the potassium-39 in the sample. After this is done the sample is then put through an incremental heating process and the released argon-40/argon-39 ratios are measured at every stage. A sample that contains only argon-40 that is a product of the decay of the potassium-40 in that sample will release argon-39 and argon-40 in the same proportion at EVERY heating step. If there is parentless argon-40 in the sample that is not a product of the decay of that sample’s potassium-40 however the ratios will change at different heating stages. This eliminates the popular claim that excess parentless argon in a sample can cause that sample to date as older than it really is.

2. Rubidium-Strontium (Rb-Sr) dating. Very useful for dating igneous rocks in particular. There are many different isotopes of Strontium (Sr-87, Sr-86, etc…). Rubidium-87 decays into Strontium-87. When magma first cools into an igneous rock formation all parts of the rock will have the same ratio of strontium-87/strontium-86 because the isotopes are freely dispersing through the molten rock prior to that time. However, once the rock hardens different parts of the rock will have different rubidium/strontium ratios than others since the atomic make-up of rubidium is larger than that of all the strontium isotopes and it will be incorporated into the structure of some minerals more or less easily than that of others. From that point on the rubidium will continue decaying into strontium-87… and the areas of the rock with higher initial ratios of rubidium/strontium will have their concentrations of strontium-87 increase at a higher rate than those with a lower ratio of rubidium-strontium. By taking multiple measurements from different sections of a sample and plotting their final ratios of strontium-87 to other strontium isotopes which, not being byproducts of the radioactive decay of other elements, have remained stable since the formation of the rock… the initial ratios of those isotopes throughout the sample can be determined and the elapsed time since the samples formation is established. Again, this method is highly resistant to any objections that we have to assume the concentrations of the isotopes in the samples being dated in order to date them. That is simply not the case. The initial concentrations are experimentally determined.

For further info on the various radiometric dating methods, and since (I believe) all the other participants in this discussion are Christians, I would highly recommend this page:

Radiometric Dating

Dr. Wiens goes into considerably greater detail than I have, there’s the added advantage of several visual aids, and he’s not a godless atheist like me for those that tend to distrust us as a matter of principle… just in case there are any of those reading along.

Constancy of Decay Rates

For my last point in this post I’ll address one more often-encountered claim. That we just assume that decay rates have remained constant over time. This is not true. The constancy of decay rates over time has been independently established by multiple tests. Among them the isotopic analysis of the byproducts of the Oklo Natural Fission Reactor at Gabon which establish that decay rates have undergone absolutely no detectable change for a minimum of the past 1.8 billion years. There is also an entire battery of interstellar observations that can be made that would detect a past alteration of decay rates since that would require a change of the fine structure constant of the universe… with quite readily observable effects. Effects which are never observed no matter how far away (and thus how old) the object is we are looking at.

And that is a summary of the “evolutionary” position on dating methods. The dates arrived at are accepted and used in establishing ancient evolutionary timelines, ages of fossils, etc... because there is extremely solid evidentiary support for the reliability of those methods.

Now, want to tell me what part of that is wrong? Or do you accept the above as accurate?

Carbon dating tells you absolutely nothing. Besides the fact that given dinosaur bones (without being told what they were) evolutionists dated fossils that were supposed to be "billions of years old" as only a few thousand years old. Hmmmm.... then when told what the bones actually were they threw those results out and said they weren't accurate... Hmmmm....

But let’s leave evolutionists behind and actually talk science for a minute.

Scientifically there is no way of testing to see if your method of carbon dating is accurate to any more years than the technology has been around for. Beyond that the experimental error resulting from just a few thousand years of interpolation could be staggering not to mention billions of years. Add to that the fact that carbon levels in the atmosphere are not constant and could have been much higher a few thousand years ago and you get that carbon dating is not a means of proving evolution in any way shape or form.

[youtube]QbvMB57evy4[/youtube]

 

[THE LIGHT]

But doesn't the bible say that the earth was made in 6 days, with man/woman on the 6th is it?

Yes, but a day in the Bible doesn't always mean a 24 hour day. Sometimes a day can mean 1000 years. Sometimes longer. You can't always read the Bible literally. You need to understand the context, the history, the author, etc. There is much to learn.

You would have a real problem if it wasn't a real day though.

 

[KittenKoder]

To address the carbon dating issue, it's accurate within a few hundred years, so older dating is more accurate than newer dating. As a matter of fact they demonstrated this with the "Noah's Ark" hoax a decade or two ago. For a long time they thought they had a piece of the ark, then the people who supposedly found it, after everyone including scientists and preachers verified it was authentic, announced that they had "made" it. Making all on both sides of the argument look foolish. They had done this to show that both religious and scientific experts were just guessing.

 

[THE LIGHT]

Um how do you know which one to use?

Good question. This process is a one way street. Shorter half lives aren't that great at dating really really old things. However, longer half lives can date older and newer objects. Imagine you have a substance that has a half life of 100 years, and you wanted to date something that's one million years old. That's a LOT of half-lives to get through, and it would be hard to determine timing based on the miniscule amount of the undegraded substance (which is why short half lives for old things can vary). But let's say you have a substance with a half life of one billion years. Well now that million-year old object isn't so bad - not even half of the substance is decayed yet, and so we have an accurate and reproducible measure of the proportions. Think of it as "longer the half life, the longer the range".

So when we talk about checking out dinosaurs, we use large half lives. When we try to date some random buried industrial building foundation that someone discovered in America, we can just use carbon dating.

You are assuming you know the age of the sample though.

This is the brain evolution gave me. So what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

A ton of evidence that supports his answer, and nothing supporting yours.

Ahhh but it is up to the interpretation of the brain to determine what is evedince for what so again what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

 

[SmarterThanHick]

You are assuming you know the age of the sample though.

No, I'm not. YOU are not reading what I type, and assuming I'm assuming. Here it is in one line, because one paragraph explanation is clearly too complex for you: when in doubt, use a larger half life, as it will be accurate.

 

[THE LIGHT]

You are assuming you know the age of the sample though.

No, I'm not. YOU are not reading what I type, and assuming I'm assuming. Here it is in one line, because one paragraph explanation is clearly too complex for you: when in doubt, use a larger half life, as it will be accurate.

So never use carbon dating?

 

[gcomeau]

You are assuming you know the age of the sample though.

No, I'm not. YOU are not reading what I type, and assuming I'm assuming. Here it is in one line, because one paragraph explanation is clearly too complex for you: when in doubt, use a larger half life, as it will be accurate.

So never use carbon dating?

Let's say you were dating something that was, in reality, 150,000 years old. But you don't know this. It was found in a location amenable to, say, Uranium/Lead dating. So you do that.

The result you get back is about 1 million years.

Does a geologist then say "oh, this thing is 1 million years old?"

NO.

The geologist says, "oh, this thing is so young it's reading at the bottom end of the resolvable range for this method... which is about 1 million years. Time to use a shorter ranged one to find out how old it really is." They then go pick a method more appropriate to a shorter date range and apply that until they get the answer. Sometimes that method is going to end up being carbon dating.

OR

You can start with something like carbon dating if the object is organic and obviously expected not to be too old. Let's face it, if you're dating a wooden table leg we know it isn't 3 billion years old. No need to pull out the super-ranged methods right out of the gate, it would just waste time and money.

Understand? Is this really that complicated?

 

[SmarterThanHick]

So never use carbon dating?

Yeah I will just parrot off of gcom. We know the range in which each isotope's accuracy. If we get too close to the edge of that range, we can just use a more appropriate isotope to hone in.

Think of it like this: Decay is all about proportions of things - how much of the original material compared to the degraded isotope. The process works best where the proportions are reliably documented. If there's 50,000 atoms of the normal material and 50,000 atoms of the isotope, we know we're at exactly 1 half life of that material - very easy. Changing one atom around doesn't really change the 1:1 proportion.

If however we have 4 atoms of the normal material and 99,980 atoms of the isotope, there's a bit of uncertainty there. Changing just one atom of the normal material drastically changes the proportion and half life calculation. This is a situation that would yield varying results, and is said to be outside the accurate dating range of that material.

With that being said, if we have absolutely no clue how old something is, we can take a random guess* first, see whether the proportions are in the accurate range, and adjust accordingly until we get a material that has a more accurate balance.

* Note: just because I used the word "guess" somewhere in an explanation does in no way infer that this specialized scientific dating is a matter of guessing. It simply means that you can start at ANY place and allow the data to tell you which direction to move until you reach a more appropriate half life material.

 

[logical4u]

Did you here the scientists have found a new partial skeleton in Africa and are saying "this one" proves there is a genetic link between humans and chimpanzees. I thought a lot of people on this thread were claiming evolution doesn't teach the whole species jump theory. Maybe you should watch the news and see the people in science preaching the evolution does jump from one species to another (even though there is NO evidence, just a bunch of puzzle pieces that they line up and say, it makes sense if it went this way). Kind of blows that whole evolution is really adaption thing, doesn't it?

 

[gcomeau]

Did you here the scientists have found a new partial skeleton in Africa and are saying "this one" proves there is a genetic link between humans and chimpanzees.

Want to provide a quote and a source? Because I'm betting what they really said was, basically, that this was yet one more link in the chain fleshing out the relationship and ancestral connections in greater detail.

At least that's what every report I've read about it said. But please, by all means, share yours.

I thought a lot of people on this thread were claiming evolution doesn't teach the whole species jump theory.

I don't even know what "species jump theory" refers to. Care to elaborate?

 

[JD_2B]

Think of it as "longer the half life, the longer the range".

So when we talk about checking out dinosaurs, we use large half lives. When we try to date some random buried industrial building foundation that someone discovered in America, we can just use carbon dating.

You are assuming you know the age of the sample though.

No- They don't "already know"- They actually measure the decay rate.. A half life is the decay rate of the sample, to put it in a nutshell.

This is the brain evolution gave me. So what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

A ton of evidence that supports his answer, and nothing supporting yours.

Ahhh but it is up to the interpretation of the brain to determine what is evedince for what so again what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

Excellent response, and one that can go both ways in this debate- The brain's ability to perceive things is completely whacked.. Everyone sees it differently. That alone is proof enough of God for me.

 

[logical4u]

Did you here the scientists have found a new partial skeleton in Africa and are saying "this one" proves there is a genetic link between humans and chimpanzees.

Want to provide a quote and a source? Because I'm betting what they really said was, basically, that this was yet one more link in the chain fleshing out the relationship and ancestral connections in greater detail.

At least that's what every report I've read about it said. But please, by all means, share yours.

I thought a lot of people on this thread were claiming evolution doesn't teach the whole species jump theory.

I don't even know what "species jump theory" refers to. Care to elaborate?

When I pointed out there is NO evidence that a species "magically" changes into another species as evolution implies, I was told that is not so, evolution is a long process of "adaption". When this partial skeleton is found, the people discussing it on TV were saying that this proved the "link" between humans and chimpanzees (saying this skeleton IS our ancestor), with no proof demonstrating the "chain" of species changes the scientists are broadcasting as facts. If you want to claim every ancient fossil as one of your relatives, that is fine, don't speak for my relatives.

 

[SmarterThanHick]

When I pointed out there is NO evidence that a species "magically" changes into another species as evolution implies, I was told that is not so

No, you were told you were wrong because evolution does NOT imply "that a species 'magically' changes into another species". Evolution shows how species change over time. There is no magic, it is not some waive of a wand and an abracadabra to instantly create new species. You have shown your inability to understand the basic principles of evolution time after time, and yet you continue to make ridiculous comments on it.

When this partial skeleton is found, the people discussing it on TV were saying that this proved the "link" between humans and chimpanzees (saying this skeleton IS our ancestor), with no proof demonstrating the "chain" of species changes the scientists are broadcasting as facts. If you want to claim every ancient fossil as one of your relatives, that is fine, don't speak for my relatives.

just because you don't understand doesn't mean it's untrue. For every fossil found, there is anatomical, physiological, genetic, and even cultural evidence that supports common ancestry. Scientists just don't look at it, say "oi! it's an ol' skeleton! it must be my great great great great uncle!" If you believe that, you don't understand the scientific process behind any great fossil find.

 

[Father Time]

I find it funny that logical is talking about magic when creationism is pretty much 'a being magically created everything'

 

[Diuretic]

Let's say you were dating something that was, in reality, 150,000 years old.

I used to have a thing for older women but that's ridiculous!


Ahhh but it is up to the interpretation of the brain to determine what is evedince for what so again what makes my answer wrong and yours right?

Excellent response, and one that can go both ways in this debate- The brain's ability to perceive things is completely whacked.. Everyone sees it differently. That alone is proof enough of God for me.

Not really. Most of us perceive things in the same way because our brains operate in the same way. Some of us, people who suffer from schizophrenia for example, don't have the sort of perception that someone without an illness has.

Brain function proves nothing about God or not God. It may well be that we have evolved to have a brain that can conceive of a creator but then that could be a load of old tosh too, I don't think we know right now.