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The Facts and Nothing but the facts
Posted on: July 9, 2009 - 3:11pm
 Offline
The Facts and Nothing but the facts
Can anyone please give me the facts that support your argument of evolution, the age of the earth, or anything else.
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Before I reveal and of our sacred FACTS, can you tell me if you're theist or atheist? It will really influence what you get.
never mind my humour. You're confusing. Why are you asking the question so oddly? I presume, having checked your previous posts, that you are atheist, but you're damned weird. Luminon, is that you? No, you're too coherent for that. You weren't asking us for the facts of how the mars rovers landed with parachutes in an ostensibly thin atmosphere.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
I am an open mind. I want to know what the heck is really going on. So what I really need is facts one way or the other. I in honestly cannot except the "fact" that there is nothing there so I need some facts to either put me there or facts that would push me the other way.
ps please don't curse in response. Thanks
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
This is your response? This is what you consider to be non-atrocious writing? To say that "I'm sure it's no in your vocabulary"as you did in the previous statement is what you consider good writing. Please excuse me from your all masterful writing skills. All I was asking you was not curse in the response to me. To damn something means that you are cursing it. So I do understand it contextuality. You obviously do not. I also know about bloody and I ask that you please do not use that. I am simply asking that you keep the foul language to yourself as I do not wish to read it. As far as your "ignorant American" joke, that shows that you are the one particularly ingnorant for judging something in which you obviously have no idea of what you are talking about. For what makes an American ignorant? What makes one intelligent? Is one that believes such as you or is it one that does not believe like you? Is it one that has a Master's degree or one that has a Doctorate? Is it one that believes in our constitution to the fullest degree and capitalism or is it one that believes that the government can fix everything and should control our every move? Either way you fall you have NO idea as to which I am. Therefore sir, I would appreciate it if you keep your idiotic comments and opinions to yourself. Thanks.
*whimper....sob*
http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/17647
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I agree that it's an odd question, but I'll do my best to give you a thorough and serious response.
The simple answer is that we have well over a hundred years of corroborating evidence pointing unequivocably at natural selection and the evolution of life. Any summary on a website will be woefully inadequate. The best biologists in the world are probably only familiar with at most a quarter of the cumulative evidence. It crosses scientific boundaries, from zoology to microbiology to organic chemistry to food science to pharmacology to medical science. In short, everything you know as part of modern medicine, food industry, or biochemical industry is completely and utterly dependent on the theory of evolution being correct. Many of the advanced medicines we have available were direct products of predictions made using the theory of evolution.
By the way, you do know that "theory" in the scientific sense doesn't mean "guess." It means a scientific explanation for an observed phenomenon. There is no question whatsoever that evolution occurs. That is science fact. The theory of evolution is science's attempt to explain the observed phenomenon. It does this by forming mathematical models based on our observations, and then testing those models as predictive resources.
Ok. Now to the hard part. What I've given you so far is basically just: "Take my word for this. The scientists know what they're talking about." If you're not content with that, get ready for several years of reading. This stuff ain't easy. Here's a list of web resources that will give you a very, very, very basic scientific explanation of how evolution works:
evolution
Chemical Evolution
molecular genetics
mutations
natural selection
For a more in-depth treatment, I recommend the following books:
Climbing Mount Improbable
Evolution, Second Edition
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Read the essays Hamy has highlighted, then read the thread linked to by Butterbattle. You'll find lots of info there on evolution and the age of the earth.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
That's not very nice. Over 90% of the theists that come to this forum have terrible grammar and punctuation anyways. His writing skills are above average.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
The short version is explained here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8asQkegV_wk
Taxation is the price we pay for failing to build a civilized society. The higher the tax level, the greater the failure. A centrally planned totalitarian state represents a complete defeat for the civilized world, while a totally voluntary society represents its ultimate success. --Mark Skousen
Thank you for having an open mind. If more people did this before deciding what they believed, the world would be a much better place.
Speaking as an American, the answer is simple: do they have a mullet? In my experience, intelligence is inversely proportional to the audacity of your mullet. This is, of course, leaving out the outlying data, which mostly consists of a smattering of wannabe gangsta' thugs and moronic skin head wannabe Nazis.
All joking aside, start with Darwin. Read "The Origin of Species." If that's too dense a work to start with, read something like Jerry A Coyne's "Why Evolution is True." Progress onto other authors, like Dawkin's "The Selfish Gene."
For the age of the earth, I haven't read a good book that simply lays out the facts and arguments, aside from something like a college textbook. This book looks like a good source, but I haven't read it yet: http://www.amazon.com/Age-Earth-G-Dalrymple/dp/0804723311/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247203764&sr=8-1
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
Well, that is an odd way of asking the question. However, you seem to have an open mind, so I will take that as suggesting that possibly you do not have the background to know a better way to ask such a question.
Honestly, the evidence does not, for the most part come in a neat little package that you can just hand to someone in a couple of sentences and then they automatically concede that they understand the matters at hand. If that were the case, then most likely, we would not still be dealing with superstition today. Heck but it would have been basic to like third grade for people to just be handed the truth of the matter and be done with it.
Rather, evidence tends to come in fairly small chunks that do not by themselves prove the whole grand scale of science. Instead of that, each small chunk only proves what it proves but taking lots of data together can tell a much grander tale of reality.
As Hamby already gave you some links on evolution, let me take the age of the earth for now.
So just how do we know that the earth is old anyway? Well, we know that the world existed several decades ago because there are plenty of people alive who remember it. Yah, I am aware that such is obscenely basic but when dealing with fundies, it is probably a good idea to get them to concede at least a couple of points from square one.
Let's go a bit further. Every year, there is a rainy season and sand, soil, whatnot washes downstream into rivers and lakes. Because that is a natural annual cycle, sediment tends to form in layers and with the right tools, you can dig out a stream bed and count the layers. Given the right local conditions, you can count back several hundred years of layers before the compression of overlaying material makes the forming sandstone too hard to dig into easily. Still something that fundies can probably agree with but even so...
Here is where it may get more interesting. You can tell quite a bit about a sedimentary rock formation by analyzing the layers. One of the earliest hints that the earth was far older than previously suspected was rock formations that showed a process called “uplift”. Basically, changes over longish periods of time broke one formation and lifted part of it up so that the layers were oriented more or less vertically (hint: Sedimentary layers just can't happen that way). Then later on, new sedimentary rock formed nearby.
Because the two sections of rock formed at very different times, the layers will not line up like they must have if it was just a broken section of a continuous formation. So it can be said with some certainty that one section of rock is much older than the other. In fact, any sufficiently deep canyon will allow one to count layers that can take you back far past the supposed biblical age of the earth.
This brings up the question of just how far back we can go. Since sedimentary rock formations do move around underground over very long periods of time, there is a limit to how far back we can go simply by counting the layers, However, we do have a way of dating some of the older layers of sedimentary rocks. Here is how that works
In the 20th century, we discovered radioactivity. From studies of the elements contained in certain rock formations, we can determine just when a bit of rock cooled from the liquid magma that resulted from a volcano. :
From dozens to hundreds of miles underground, there is a layer of the earth that is essentially liquid rock that is constantly swirling and mixing. Once that rock comes up to a point where it can cool down and solidify, it obviously stops mixing and that allows us to analyze the content of the rock to determine just how long it has been solid for.
The fact is that every bit of volcanic rock has small quantities of very long lived elements such as uranium and radium which decay at very well defined rates into other elements. By analyzing the ratios of the longer lived parent elements to the daughter elements, we can make a good determination as to just how long that rock has been in solid form for. From such studies, we can determine that some of the rocks at the bottom of the grand canyon are over tow billion years old!
Additionally, we can perform the same type of analysis on sedimentary rocks. However, that will correlate not on the age of the sedimentary rock itself but rather to the age when the original formations that became the sand of that layer cooled.
Now at this point, it should be obvious that sedimentary rocks cannot be older than the volcanic rocks that they formed from. They are always younger, sometimes they can be millions of years younger but how can we know just how much younger? Honestly, that is a topic that would take longer to explain that I really want to go into. However, if you remember that a sedimentary formation will have a maximum age, we can determine what that must have been.
Here is an interesting formation:
Notice the sharp transition near where the pencil is pointed? Well, we find that same transition all over the world which strongly suggests that the cause must have been something that was of global proportions. There are very few things that will cause that to happen. Also, remember that sedimentary layers have a well defined maximum age. As it happens, nowhere that we find that particular transition has it ever formed on top of a layer that is greater than sixty-five million years old.
So from that, we know just about when it happened. Also, from chemical analysis, we know just what happened there. The fact is that it shows a large quantity of the element iridium, which there is very little of on the earth but quite a bit of in space.
OK, by now, you should be suspecting what I have done. That is the K-T boundary. Sixty-five million years ago, a huge freaking meteorite hit the earth in the area that is now the Yucatan peninsula. Above that, no dinosaurs, below that, plenty of dinosaurs.
=
However with that you said two things that really caught me. Water and radioactive dating. Could not all of those layers been done with a huge flood. Not necessarily Noah's flood but the Native Americans talk of a flood, so do the Incas, and so do the Chinese. So isn't it possible that all of that formed when the whole earth flooded. Also with radioactive dating, I have seen studies that it has been proven very shakiy at best. Just asking the question. Thanks for your explanation. Very though provoking.
However with that you said two things that really caught me. Water and radioactive dating. Could not all of those layers been done with a huge flood. Not necessarily Noah's flood but the Native Americans talk of a flood, so do the Incas, and so do the Chinese. So isn't it possible that all of that formed when the whole earth flooded. Also with radioactive dating, I have seen studies that it has been proven very shakiy at best. Just asking the question. Thanks for your explanation. Very though provoking.
What studies? I would like to read them.
No, pure, plain, simple... No
Radioactive dating?
or
Radiometric dating?
I dont think you know what either, are...
edit; (wanna see if he gets this one!)
What Would Kharn Do?
I don't think so.
This kind of layering is not what you would expect from a flood. Fossils found in each layer are dated to different time periods. Also, a worldwide flood is impossible for a number of reasons.
Edit: For one, there simply isn't enough water to cover the Earth up to the highest mountain. You also have to wonder how all the animals and plants, including all the freshwater and saltwater fish survived. If there was a Noah's Ark or some such thing, you run into about a dozen other problems. How did they fit all the animals onto the Ark? How did they fit all the food necessary to feed the animals? What about small insects and microorganisms?
Do you have a link or reference for one of these studies?
We discussed radiometric dating extensively in the thread I linked in my previous post. Michael's responses to AIN's questions are especially informative.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Floods are common in many places of the world. Yes, they can be big, but only in a localized term. If any large-scale flood happened in the world, it would be so disastrous evidence would be easily available to anyone looking at extinctions. You would see mass sea life dieing at the same time as land life, as salt content in the water went to almost nothing. Think of all the ocean life that cannot survive in a fresh water environment.
That evidence simply isn't there for anything in anywhere close to recent history.
Theism is why we can't have nice things.
And just to reaffirm the point that butterbattle made (thanks for that
)... I tried extensively to explain radiometric dating to AiN. Read that thread and it may answer questions you have.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
No. It doesn't match flood deposit patterns, among other issues.
Any civilization which arose near rivers or oceans(which happens to be pretty much every civilization) will have flood myths simply because real floods occur that cause large scale damage and loss of life. These stories become epic worldwide floods over generations, and are the most likely roots of these myths.
For one thing, think about how a flood happens today. You will get an undifferentiated mass of different organisms, not the orderly layered deposits we see. That's just one particular point.
I would like to see those studies. I would imagine that they are the same ones I've already seen. If so, you are reading what amounts to creationist propoganda. These techniques are on solid scientific grounds.
All that is necessary for the triumph of good is that evil men do nothing.
I admit this is a very beautiful theory. This would seem to imply that the problem of radiometric dating has been solved, and that there are no anomalies. So if we take a lava flow and date several minerals for which one knows the daughter element is excluded, we should always get the exact same date, and it should agree with the accepted age of the geological period. Is this true? I doubt it very much. If the radiometric dating problem has been solved in this manner, then why do we need isochrons, which are claimed to be more accurate?
The same question could be asked in general of minerals that are thought to yield good dates. Mica is thought to exclude Sr, so it should yield good Rb-Sr dates. But are dates from mica always accepted, and do they always agree with the age of their geologic period? I suspect not.
Indeed, there are a number of conditions on the reliability of radiometric dating. For example, for K-Ar dating, we have the following requirements:
For this system to work as a clock, the following 4 criteria must be fulfilled:
1. The decay constant and the abundance of K40 must be known accurately.
2. There must have been no incorporation of Ar40 into the mineral at the time of crystallization or a leak of Ar40 from the mineral following crystallization.
3. The system must have remained closed for both K40 and Ar40 since the time of crystallization.
4. The relationship between the data obtained and a specific event must be known.
The requirements for radiometric dating are stated in another way, at the web site http://hubcap.clemson.edu/spurgeon/books/apology/Chapter7.html:
"But what about the radiometric dating methods? The earth is supposed to be nearly 5 billion years old, and some of these methods seem to verify ancient dates for many of earth's igneous rocks. The answer is that these methods, are far from infallible and are based on three arbitrary assumptions (a constant rate of decay, an isolated system in which no parent or daughter element can be added or lost, and a known amount of the daughter element present initially)."
Here are more quotes about radiometric dating from http://www.parentcompany.com/handy_dandy/hder12.htm:
"All of the parent and daughter atoms can move through the rocks. Heating and deformation of rocks can cause these atoms to migrate, and water percolating through the rocks can transport these substances and redeposit them. These processes correspond to changing the setting of the clock hands. Not infrequently such resetting of the radiometric clocks is assumed in order to explain disagreements between different measurements of rock ages. The assumed resettings are referred to as `metamorphic events' or `second' or `third events.' "
And again,
"It is also possible that exposure to neutrino, neutron, or cosmic radiation could have greatly changed isotopic ratios or the rates at some time in the past."
It is known that neutrinos interact with atomic nucleii, so a larger density of neutrinos could have sped up radioactive decay and made matter look old in a hurry. Some more quotes from the same source:http://www.trueauthority.com/cvse/radiometric.htm
Only goes to prove that you haven't actually read/understood the things we pointed you to. All those links address the "problems" addressed by your links. These things don't need an answer outside of iscochron dating - they are answered y isochron dating.
Please read the whole thread linked to by butterbattle. You'll find lots of evidence and explanation for evolution as well as radiometric dating. That thread will answer all of the prolems you've just raised here.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
With the caveat that this isn't my field (age of the earth), I do know that the main reason we use different kinds of radiometric methods is that different methods have different ranges of accuracy. Method A is great for a range of a few hundred thousand years, but basically useless for getting 10,000 year margin of error, where Method B gives us precision without range.
It's really a lot like the evidence for evolution. There isn't one single scientific tool that will validate the whole thing to the satisfaction of every scientist in every discipline. The big picture comes from the combination of many sources, all pointing to the same conclusions. It's about cumulative corroboration.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
I'd like to add a little point about localized floods and fossils and such.
There already *are* deposits of fossils of animals that died in floods. One famous one (at least for dino nuts) is in Arizona's Petrified Forest (or near it... been a while since I checked the books). It consists of piles of bones of early therapods all jumbled together, crushed together, in fact, and the pattern looks like what a collection of animals that died in a flood and whose bones collected in one area should look like.
However, when it comes to a world-wide flood: Nope. Not even the tiniest bit of evidence- even if you can figure out where all the water came from/where it went.
I don't know what problem you're referring to, but as long as there's the possibility of contamination or human error, there will be anomalies.
The accuracy decreases with age, and the accepted age is partly the result of this dating method, but yes.
What?
Isochron dating is a complex technique used in radiometric dating. You can't perform isochron dating without radiometric dating. Isochron dating is based on radiometric dating. How does this cast doubt on the validity of radiometric dating?
No respectable scientist would ever claim that a dating method is "infallible." That term is reserved for the religious.
It is not assumed; it is observed and understood to be constant.
We don't assume these either. Look, not everything is so frickin simple and clean-cut. We start with the premise that we don’t know whether there was any contamination or whether the date was accurate. As Hamby stated, much of science is based on endless testing and cumulative corroboration. We check the samples’ environment for possible contamination. We date 10 different samples of the same kind of material using five different dating methods. See if they match up. Date various objects of known age to see whether the dating method was reliable. Etc. etc. etc.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Could you please explain your post?
I am an open mind.
I feel like being an ass now. [ass]
[ass]
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
First of all, only idiots such as yourself shoot themselves in the foot. Further more, no I do not own a gun. Also, for you to be studying linguistics, you sure have a far way to go. But regardless of all that, what makes you so much more intelligent than I. You again, are using a whole lot of assumptions and you know what that does don't you. When could I expect to see you type something that would be worth actually debating over instead of the ignorant assumptions that you make about me. Why do you not take a stand and answer the questions that I ask you? What makes me ignorant and you not. Because from where I am sitting, you are the absent minded one my friend. So please do explain yourself oh mighty and super intelligent being who is only been alive long enough to not even complete undergraduate school. lol
Why are you dodging the posters who did answer your question and focusing on the one who didn't?
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
I've never said I was more intelligent than you. I don't think I've ever questioned your intelligence. I have questioned your level of ignorance, though I admit I didn't define what would make you particularly ignorant. I assumed you were American (well, I did ask you where you were from after that, since the first instance was somewhat tongue-in-cheek). I've asked you a lot of questions. One of which you answered directly, above, and another which you answered indirectly.
Is that what you wanted explained? Nevermind. Answer only if you want to feed the troll.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
I don't think I am dodging. I have answered some of them. There is a lot to read in all of those. I am trying to descern it all. I just get frustrated when people attack me for no good reason that is all.
Agreed.
You just seem to be overly concerned with Thomathy - his original request was if you would consider his use of British idioms as cursing.
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
— George Carlin
I think fifty dollars will buy a room for a half hour in Canada, won't it? I'm not sure which way the attraction goes... but I've seen this kind of thing before. (Cough, cough... pineapple... kevin...)
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Does this mean that you're a graduate student?
So, uh, what other questions do you have?
Lol.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
No, you're not an open mind.
You've deceptively asked for facts simply to argue, which is fine. But try MANNING UP and just saying you're a theist and you double dawg dare us to wipe the delusions from your muddled mind. As a theist you can't handle the facts. Scramble back to your creationist garbage.
Respectfully,
Lenny
"The righteous rise, With burning eyes, Of hatred and ill-will
Madmen fed on fear and lies, To beat and burn and kill"
Witch Hunt from the album Moving Pictures. Neal Pert, Rush
Really, is that what you call it? All I have been doing is asking questions and all I get is more theories, more estimations, and more attacks. If I were a theist, this would most definitely keep me there. Why do you not man up and wipe the delusions from my mind if you can. But again the more I read, it is more theories, more estimations and more attacks. The fact is that it takes a true choice to believe in either creation or evolution. I see that and I am definitely beginning to see which way I am leaning. I have been talking with my coworking named Scott and everything that you guys have said to me and all of the websites you have given me. He has had an answer and it made sense to me. He did not accuse me of being an idiot or tell me that I am lying and not a man. I brought you arguments that he brought me. You say I cannot handle the facts and I say you have none for me to handle. So mark this down. Because of you, I start today saying I don't know what I will do but I know there must be something out there because there is not way you guys can be right.
Science IS theory and estimation. Please provide a clear definition of "fact," before you criticize this point. What exactly do you consider to be a fact?
Whether you believe in God or not, you should hold to the position because you believe it is the truth. It is the logical conclusion, supported by the most evidence. Insults from random people on the Internet shouldn't affect your decision.
Because I don't have magical powers. I can't automatically make you change your mind.
What are you looking for? Did you really read everything we linked?
What's a 'true choice?'
Can you tell us what the answer was?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
This link doesn't work. The other one is fine.
To my limited knowledge, many of the statements in this article are valid criticisms of radiometric dating (maybe someone will correct me), but rather irrelevant, as they have long been acknowledged in the scientific community. Radiometric dating works regardless. It has always been accepted that samples can be contaminated in various ways. The trick is, again, 'cumulative corroboration.'
I won't say much more, since, so far, I haven't been able to access the various papers that the article referenced (I need to pay money and subscribe, yuck). Thus, I couldn't verify the claims in the article. But, if nothing else, I encourage you to dig deeper into these topics before making your decision. I mean, it's important, right?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
...Wait.
I have some questions for you now.
Why should any argument for the validity of evolution or geologic science make you any less sure that a god exists? Would an argument for the validity of euclidean geometry make you less sure that a god exists? Why should it be mutually exclusive that evolution be the correct explanation of the observed phenomenon of gradual change through natural selection and that a god exist?
You should not be looking at evolution as something that should disprove a belief in god. Gravity was not an explainable concept before Newton applied scientific principle to it. It existed before anyone knew that an object of sufficient mass would create a well in space-time, bending it around it so that objects within that well would be pulled toward it. The explanation of the observation did not alter belief in god(s). Telescopes and the ensuing investigation of the universe did not largely alter belief in god(s). God has merely moved farther away. Receeded to an extra-dimensional home, everywhere and nowhere in this universe and to some people, intimately involved in human affairs. Perhaps even an omni-propertied being that created life, the universe and everything. And sometimes, in a fit of complete idiocy, it is the creator of life, the universe and everything only some 6 thousand years ago, beginning with two fully evolved humans in a garden.
Again, what difference should evolution and geologic science being accurate make to you? In my opinion they should not matter very much. You believe in something and in things which are either unverifiable or patently inaccurate. You believe in them based on faith. You believe in them based on a belief without and despite evidence. Perhaps, before you attempt to gather unto you the facts or evidence which support the theories which form our understanding of the universe and the laws which govern it and our understanding of it, you should look toward yourself and wonder if there isn't something you've missed. Maybe you've jumped the gun.
You've undertaken an investigation using the very tools which you question with suspicion because you believe they serve to invalidate your beliefs. They do, of course, but they must first be applied to your beliefs. If you can accept that people better educated than you, with access to the same tools of investigation as you have, have come to the conclusion that evolution best fits as an explanation of the observed phenomenon and have made accessible to you, sometimes in layman's terms, the reasoning for their conclusion, and you can use their very tools of investigation to check on that reasoning, then you are obliged to admit some kind of cognitive dissonance. You cannot expect to use the scientific method, rational empiricism, to verify or disprove evolution and also to validate beliefs which you hold on faith.
What needs to be examined is your faith. You must come to see it for what it is and either to accept it as belief that is not based on evidence and that is not falsifiable or to reject it for the faulty reasoning that it is. Evolution's veracity will not affect that. I might be an ass, but I'm reasonable. Are you?
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
OK Thomathy, you deserve this one:
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I can't see that. Especially if it's youtube. Not at work.
I always do this to myself; innuendo.
BigUniverse wrote,
"Well the things that happen less often are more likely to be the result of the supper natural. A thing like loosing my keys in the morning is not likely supper natural, but finding a thousand dollars or meeting a celebrity might be."
Saw this coming from a mile away (well, except the attacks bit) since I read this:
And to the credit of other, more thorough posters to this tread, I doubt I was the only one.
Anyways, thanks for the links guys.
BTW, did anyone here liked my former Lenore siggy enough to have saved it? bloody photo bucket-o'-piss deleted my account and, since I can't find in which disk I had the siggy, cute little Lenore is lost
Lenore, The Cute Little Dead Girl. Twice as good as Jesus.
In my experience, there are two kinds of people who ask for evidence for evolution: Creationists and ex-creationists. Typically, ex-creationists will identify themselves as such to explain their ignorance. Anyone who asks for evidence and doesn't give a reason for not being on par with a 9th grade science education... well, it must be a creationist in hiding.
Atheism isn't a lot like religion at all. Unless by "religion" you mean "not religion". --Ciarin
http://hambydammit.wordpress.com/
Books about atheism
Can't you just go on Google images and find another pic?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
I'm on it... should be able to get access to most articles for free.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
In a further update.... AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH
Cwiley - I had been writing a rather thorough rebuttal of the ParentCompany article you referenced. Unfortunately I'm a ham-fisted tit and closed my browser without saving anything. So what I'll say is this: Just because something looks scientific it doesn't mean it is. The ParentCompany references are bad - misspelled names, wrong dates etc. - and also, at times, deliberately misleading. Much of what they're referencing is speculation, bad science, misunderstood statistics, quote mining, or a combination of all of these things.
As an example: Reference 2 in the article - which is used to back up the idea that decay rates can change - is actually an interesting paper on the theory of randomness in radioactive decay. The theory simply states that there is no mechanism to govern which atom in a radioactive sample will be the next to decay. It's a random process. Reference 2 uses statistical analysis to suggest, rather inconclusively, that the process is not random (doesn't follow a poisson distribution) and could in fact be ordered. However, this has nothing to do with the rate of decay. The rate of decay isn't even an experimental factor. To suggest that this paper shows that decay rates can change is indicative of someone being misleading or of someone not understanding the paper.
I currently don't have the time to write out the whole thing again. I'll make you a deal. If you read all the other material that we've linked to and you still have questions like those raised by ParentCompany then I'll make another crack at writing down my rebuttal.
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Well would you be kind enough to give us some of Scott's answers to the things we've linked to, so that we might respond?
M
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Yah, well real understanding of this material takes time and for the type of questions that you have, lots of it. Those of us who are trying to help you have spent many years getting this material into our heads as well.
In here, you will meet a few people who are working on advanced degrees or actually employed in the fields of which they speak. You will also meet people who are habitually curious and have spent many years reading up on these topics. You have also discovered that there are people here who get grumbly at each other because they have seen the same invalid points being made over and over.
My advice for the last group is to do your best to ignore them and move on with the inquiries that you started this thread for. Granted, that is not always easy but the better you are at ignoring them, the more time that you can spend learning.
Well, I hope that you don't mind the fact that I cleaned that up a bit. Really though, I wanted to concentrate on the parts that I left.
The fact is that theories and estimations is exactly what science deals in. Much of what you seem to be looking for is not really best answered without covering some fairly basic material first. Really, every real inquiry into nature has to start somewhere and where it must start is about estimating what is going on. Advancing a possible explanation to account for the observations and checking to see if that explanation is good enough to warrant continuing that line of thought. In a nutshell: estimation and theory.
Seriously, science begins with being “good enough for now”. If that works, then scientists can try to work on good enough for the next step.
I think that you misunderstand where science comes from. Science does not offer you something to believe in. Science offers a whole huge process where you can say that you don't need belief because you have understanding of the matters at hand. As your knowledge continues to build, I think that you will find that understanding beats belief out of the water.
I don't know dude. I don't believe that I ever said that you can't handle the facts. Rather, my point is that you can handle the facts but it simply will not happen overnight. And yes, there is something out there if you want to take the time to look for it. What we can help you with is understanding. Understanding is, as I said above, much cooler than believing.
In closing, allow me to address one point that you seem to be confused on more specifically:
That would be inaccurate. Yes, the work that has been done could in some sense be called beautiful. However, it is not a finished thing that can give some arbitrarily precise date to any given sample.
Let's consider carbon 14 dating here. We know the rate at which carbon 14 decays to a fairly high degree of precision. However, there is some uncertainty on the matter, arising from the fact that it does not form at a perfectly uniform rate.
The major source for the formation of carbon 14 is cosmic rays (high energy particles from space) hitting stable nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere. There is a small variability in that process and due to that, we can't really nail down precise dates to better than the degree of certainty that we have for that part of the process.
Now we can check the amount of carbon 14 in samples that can be dated in other ways, such as tree rings. Since we have found a few trees that were alive a bit over 2,000 years ago, we can synch the carbon clock to the tree ring clock that far back. For those dates, we have a high level of confidence.
Going further back, there are other ways to date stuff but with less precision. For each way of dating a sample, we can synch up the carbon clock but only to the degree that we are confident of other dating methods. Generally, we can compare the carbon clock to other clocks and get a date that is accurate to perhaps 50 years or so. For many purposes, that is accurate enough.
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