US rejecting science?

[brianhos]

Just an honest question...does anybody know how long carbon dating has been around? I was thinking like 50 years or so, but I'm not sure. I guess my thought is that while it seems accurate, who is to say that carbon continues to change at that rate forever? It may be accurate and it may not...I just don't think we've had enough time to be 100% sure about things that we think are millions of years old. To me it would be like watching a baby from age 0-16...you could deduce that by the time they were 32 they would be 12 feet tall since they grew 6 feet in their first 16 years. I don't know a whole lot about carbon dating, but I've wondered how people can be sure of the dates on things like that.

Carbon dating was first used in the late 50's. It was discovered by Willard Libby who won a nobel prize for it in like 1960 or something.

WOW, I just used something I learned in college. I guess those 3 years as a chem major finally paid off. All that hard work so I can answer chemistry questions on CF... You all ove me $100 so I can recoup the costs of 3 years of college.

 

[zdorr40]

There's also a question about the translation of that part of Genesis. Instead of the earth was void, some say it can be translated the earth became void, indicating the earth has been around awhile, but something destroyed it.

 

[brianhos]

It may be accurate and it may not...I just don't think we've had enough time to be 100% sure about things that we think are millions of years old. To me it would be like watching a baby from age 0-16...you could deduce that by the time they were 32 they would be 12 feet tall since they grew 6 feet in their first 16 years. I don't know a whole lot about carbon dating, but I've wondered how people can be sure of the dates on things like that.

It is very accurate. It works by detecting the radioactive decay of carbon in all living things. All living things have 3 kinds of carbon, c12 c13 and c14. C14 is an unstable isotope, so it will decay back into c12 which is very stable. You can figure out the age of things by seeing how much of that c14 has been converted into c12. Radio carbon dating is usually accurate to like +- 50 years.

 

[larrysarmy]

"So Larry, then it's also true that we're all inbred, and that Adam lived for thousands of years, and that Noah's family, then in turn the rest of the world, are fairly, well, into their sisters and brothers.

Given that you believe in literal translations are the essence of faith, what's your take on Paradise Lost, and Milton's theory that the earth and man were only created because God had to create a hell for Lucipher, and that the only reason man fell from grace was because of Eve, or women in general?"

Cyclone62

>Inbred...no. The Bible does condem inbreding, see the Book of Leviticus. In Genesis, there was no law against inbreding at that time, furthermore, they were commanded to populate and fill the earth. It all had to start somewhere, Genesis gives us the answer.

Your take on other's theory's such as Milton and Paradise Lost, I'll be honest, I haven't really dug too deep into those. I am just portraying what the word of God says of how we got here.

However, your last point of the fall of man and Eve are very close to the position the Bible stands on. Sin entered the world because of Adam and to a certain point, Eve as well. The context that we can pull from that piece of Scripture, is that God instructed Adam not to eat from the tree. God then created a "helper" for Adam, thus the creation of wo-man, Eve. The application is the man is the head of the household and didn't stop Eve from eating from the tree. Then trying to put the blame on God and Eve for doing it!

Other application pulled from that text is a sense of general "free will." Choose God or choose yourself. God leaves that choice to us. It's not a forced relationship.

It's not downgrading women either, the context is sin and the fall. Which ultimately paves the way for Christ and the atonement. Again, trying to smash the two together...God and evolution...just don't jive. Scripture makes no mention of it and is quite contrary to the two beliefs.

 

[larrysarmy]

"It is very accurate. It works by detecting the radioactive decay of carbon in all living things. All living things have 3 kinds of carbon, c12 c13 and c14. C14 is an unstable isotope, so it will decay back into c12 which is very stable. You can figure out the age of things by seeing how much of that c14 has been converted into c12. Radio carbon dating is usually accurate to like +- 50 years."

>Sorry to jump in, but C14 dating is not the end all be all of dating. There are several radiometric dating methods that have shown to yield different ages. To say it's accuracy is within 50 years is hard to swallow. I'll admit, I don't go and date rocks and bones so I can't be completely sure on the age. But I know many question this dating method very seriously, and question the open or closed system in which a particlur object (ie: a rock) has been exposed to. Again, not an expert.

 

[larrysarmy]

"No one knows. The word for "day" doesn't literally mean a 24 day period. Translated it just means a period of time. The word "era" would probably be a more appropriate translation"

Cyclone65
> Good question, one I had for a long time. Actually, in the Hebrew language, the word day is "yom" and there is a Hebrew gramatical law that if a adj or number precedes "yom", it almost always means...a day (24 hour). Some instances, it "could" mean a longer span of time (IE ..for in the day of Noah), but never is it millions of years. Especially in Gen 1, ...it's written, "On the first Day...On the Second Day, ect.

 

[tigershoops31]

It is very accurate. It works by detecting the radioactive decay of carbon in all living things. All living things have 3 kinds of carbon, c12 c13 and c14. C14 is an unstable isotope, so it will decay back into c12 which is very stable. You can figure out the age of things by seeing how much of that c14 has been converted into c12. Radio carbon dating is usually accurate to like +- 50 years.

Thanks for the good info...I didn't know exactly how it worked. I guess my big question is that if carbon dating began in the late 50's, how do we know that it's accurate to +- 50 years when it's only been in existence for 50ish? To me it just seems like we COULD just be looking at a small piece of a big puzzle, not unlike the human development process where a person grows fairly steadily for many years, but then stops growing and eventually "settles" (unfortunately at 26 it feels like I've begun to "settle" :sad9cd. Obviously it seems like the most useful dating tool that we have, but I just wonder if it will prove accurate over a longer period of time.

 

[brianhos]

Thanks for the good info...I didn't know exactly how it worked. I guess my big question is that if carbon dating began in the late 50's, how do we know that it's accurate to +- 50 years when it's only been in existence for 50ish? To me it just seems like we COULD just be looking at a small piece of a big puzzle, not unlike the human development process where a person grows fairly steadily for many years, but then stops growing and eventually "settles" (unfortunately at 26 it feels like I've begun to "settle" :sad9cd. Obviously it seems like the most useful dating tool that we have, but I just wonder if it will prove accurate over a longer period of time.

It all has to do with how exact the measurements are. With a mass spectrometer, you can get pretty close, but everyone knows it is not 100% perfect. Thus the +- 50 years comes from our inability to get 100% perfect measurements. Keep in mind, when carbon dating first started that margin of error was much much higher. I have heard it is down to +- 30 years now.

 

[jbhtexas]

It is very accurate. It works by detecting the radioactive decay of carbon in all living things. All living things have 3 kinds of carbon, c12 c13 and c14. C14 is an unstable isotope, so it will decay back into c12 which is very stable. You can figure out the age of things by seeing how much of that c14 has been converted into c12. Radio carbon dating is usually accurate to like +- 50 years.

How do you know it's accurate? We don't have objects of definitively known age that can be used as standards to calibrate or judge the "accuracy" of the methods that we use to determine the age of "really old" things. All dating methods are just huge extrapolations of physical behavior that scientists have observed over the last 100 years.

 

[brianhos]

How do you know it's accurate? We don't have objects of definitively known age that can be used as standards to calibrate or judge the "accuracy" of the methods that we use to determine the age of "really old" things. All dating methods are just huge extrapolations of physical behavior that scientists have observed over the last 100 years.

So now we are going to have an argument about if physics is correct or not? But see we do have objects of known age, that have been verified using carbon dating. You can take a realitivly new items of known date and find the half life using currently available tools and find a pretty close age. Radio carbon dating is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of proving that the earth is older than 6000 years.

 

[larrysarmy]

"So now we are going to have an argument about if physics is correct or not? But see we do have objects of known age, that have been verified using carbon dating. You can take a realitivly new items of known date and find the half life using currently available tools and find a pretty close age. Radio carbon dating is not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of proving that the earth is older than 6000 years."

>Realitivly new items? I guess if we know they are new, we have a basis of their age. I would need to know these items of which you speak, to qualify them as "new". What about really old items of no known date? Are you assuming their environment hasn't changed and has always been, thus creating a perfect system in which something can be dated? Of course not, there is no way of knowing what object we are dating has always been in its current state. Unless of course, we could observe it from the beginning to now. Which raises another question, where did matter for dating purposes come from at all? Has a rock always been?
C14 is a method, but one that raises some serious questions and while it could be true (I concede that), I wouldn't peddle it as fact within a range of 30-50 years.

 

[jbhtexas]

So now we are going to have an argument about if physics is correct or not? But see we do have objects of known age, that have been verified using carbon dating.

All that proves is that the method works for dating objects up to the age of the "known" object. It doesn't guarantee that the method will work for older objects.

To use any dating method to determine the age of objects older than the oldest "known" objects requires the assumption that the particle physics that we observe now hold true over thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of years. I'm not saying it's a bad assumption, but please realize that the method is based on an assumption that is not definitively provable.

Anybody who's ever fit a polynomial to a data set can tell you about the potential dangers of extrapolation...

 

[brianhos]

How do you know it's accurate? We don't have objects of definitively known age that can be used as standards to calibrate or judge the "accuracy" of the methods that we use to determine the age of "really old" things. All dating methods are just huge extrapolations of physical behavior that scientists have observed over the last 100 years.

Because it is a measurable decay. You can measure it now, and then measure it again tomorrow, and find the difference, and now you know the decay rate. It is pretty basic science.

I guess you do not believe in time either, that is all based on the decay of cesium atoms. Every wonder how all the worlds important clocks are kept in sync? cesium decay!

 

[jbhtexas]

Because it is a measurable decay. You can measure it now, and then measure it again tomorrow, and find the difference, and now you know the decay rate. It is pretty basic science.

How do you know that the decay rate is constant over thousands or millions of years? I'm not saying that it isn't, I just want you to tell me how you know that it is.

I guess you do not believe in time either, that is all based on the decay of cesium atoms. Every wonder how all the worlds important clocks are kept in sync? cesium decay!

I don't think so. I don't see anything about cesium decay in the following article from NIST...

NIST-F1 - Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock

 

[CloneFan65]

Like I said before, it's like arguing with my 4-year-old. I know this is true because it says so in my translation of the Bible. And the Bible is the truth. It has to be the truth because it's the word of God. And I know it's the word of God because it says so in the Bible. And the Bible is the truth. :rolleyes5cz:

 

[flyhighcy]

I refuse to accept evolution because if it were true..then Hawkeye fans and cyclone fans would have the same genetic code...and I don't like that idea.

 

[ISUKyro]

I refuse to accept evolution because if it were true..then Hawkeye fans and cyclone fans would have the same genetic code...and I don't like that idea.

LOL, you have opened my eyes to new thinking :laugh8kb:

 

[larrysarmy]

"Like I said before, it's like arguing with my 4-year-old. I know this is true because it says so in my translation of the Bible. And the Bible is the truth. It has to be the truth because it's the word of God. And I know it's the word of God because it says so in the Bible. And the Bible is the truth."

>Clone65, not sure if this in response to our convo earlier, but I'll take one last stab as well.

The Bible is the best selling book of all time. Nothing even compares. Every year more Bibles are printed, sold, given away than any literature in it's time. Does that make it the word of God...NO.

The Bible, as a historical document, is tremendous. Meaning, the times, places, people, rulers, kings, rivers, cities, mountains, ect have been actually verified by archeologists. Does that make it the word of God...NO. But as a historical document, it demands respect interms of the verifiable people and places the Bible talkes about. Those concepts in the Bible were not made up or the changed by early church spin and deception.

The Bible displays a genuine prophetical nature. It shows God is not bound by time. It's not 1 book, but 66 books all written over a span of 1500 years. There is one central thread woven throughout all the books... that a savior would come and redeem mankind....that person was Jesus Christ. Over 300 prophecies of Christ alone were fullfilled, via Old Testament Prophecies. The text is a progressive revelation, no other religious can compare. Not to mention countless other prophecies being fullfilled and some having yet to come (end times). Does that make it the word of God...NO, but were getting pretty close.

Look, it's not my job to convince you to believe in the God of the Bible. All I can do is proclaim it. Proclaim that we have all sinned. Have you lied? Stolen? Looked with lust? Coveted? Hated someone? Always put God first in your life? How we doing so far, failed? Probably...just like me.
The Bible says that all liars will have their part in the lake of fire (hell)...we all are guilty.

But God so loved the world...he provided a way out...for FREE. Repent (turn from sin) and trust in Christ and you shall be saved. God will save the repentant heart and will make you born again. John 3:3

 

[C.John]

I refuse to accept evolution because if it were true..then Hawkeye fans and cyclone fans would have the same genetic code...and I don't like that idea.

Actually, your post has allowed me to fully accept evolution as truth. You see, my entire family consists of Hawk fans. My brother and sister in-law are Iowa grads, my extended family have been season ticket holders for decades and one of my Aunt and Uncles even have a Women's Basketball scholarship named after them (thanks to a 200K endowment they gave). Everyone in my family wears black and gold, EXCEPT me. You see, I EVOLVED into a higher being, I became a Cyclone. If that doesn't prove that evolution has and does exist, then I don't know what else to say.



Except, Go Clones!

 

[CloneFan65]

Look, it's not my job to convince you to believe in the God of the Bible.

No need to. I'm a Christian.