To Non-believers?
Can you give me one piece of evidence toward the earth being older then 6000 or so years in age? Mind you I am going to combat your eviendence.
1) The moon is leaving the earth. It i sgetting farther away each year. It also governs the tides. In the past of course the moon was closer. Causing the tides to be so strong that it would flood all of the earth twice daily. And not that long ago either.
2) The earth is slowing down. They call it a leap second. About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year. If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster. You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old.
[...]
Oil has been shown to be made from just about anything in the matter of a few moments.
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And the half life cannot be accurately determined as we have no knowledge of what decays faster in the past as we aren't sure of the environment or atmosphere which science can tell you would play havoc on the half life.
28 comments
@Misguided
1) The moon is leaving the earth. It i sgetting farther away each year. It also governs the tides. In the past of course the moon was closer. Causing the tides to be so strong that it would flood all of the earth twice daily. And not that long ago either.
The moon's slipping farther away at too slow a rate.
2) The earth is slowing down. They call it a leap second. About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year. If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster. You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old.
Wrong. The leap second thing has more to do with the fact that a year's not exactly 24hrs long.
Oil has been shown to be made from just about anything in the matter of a few moments.
And they've oxidized noble elements. All happen under extreme circumstances you'd not find on this planet.
And the half life cannot be accurately determined as we have no knowledge of what decays faster in the past as we aren't sure of the environment or atmosphere which science can tell you would play havoc on the half life.
Wrong! Atomic decay has nothing to do with those things. It happens to be the rate at which the atom sheds various particles.
*Points to King Clone, an 11,700 yeal old tree. Also points out tree rings will occur twice a year only under extremely rare conditions that would leave behind a shit load of evidence.*
1. Yes, the moon is slowly moving farther away from the earth. At approximately 3.8cm per year. Given that the moon is 380 thousand Km out, that means that it's not changing very much. In the past, with gravitational effects, this rate would have been even smaller.
2. The leap second is because the earth's rotation period is actually 23.9345 hours, but we think it's easier to claim that we've got 24 hours and skip a second every once in a while. If the second was because the earth was slowing down, we'd have to skip more and more seconds every year.
3. I would really like to see wherever it shows that oil can be made from just about anything in a few moments, as well as which oil company conspiracy is keeping it undercover so they can keep pumping oil out of the ground in politically unstable regions of the world.
4. Environment and atmosphere have nothing to do with half life. That's why we use it to date things. If we could alter half lives with environmental factors, don't you think that all these nuclear waste disposal issues that have come up would be easier to solve?
In summary, you're a moron, and should stop trying to prove YEC.
What Napoleon the Clown said - and also if oil can be made from just about anything then just why are Oil companies spending so much money on exploration and drilling the stuff up from inhospitable environments ?
Oh - and as for the "one piece of evidence" - although Help! has 'engaged' (can't think of a more polite way to put it) with Astronomy and biochemistry he seems to have somehow managed to completely miss any discussion of the following:
- Geology (Rock strata and/or erosion)
- Archeology (Human or otherwise)
- Why the bible does not mention things like "And lo, Noah said to god 'there's no way we're going to get two sodding Brontasauri onto this ark guvnor.' "
"To Non-believers?"
Why is this a question?
"Can you give me one piece of evidence toward the earth being older then 6000 or so years in age?"
Yes, I believe we can.
"Mind you I am going to combat your eviendence."
Please notice how I am NOT quaking in my boots.
"1) The moon is leaving the earth. It i sgetting farther away each year."
That is true, however it is getting farther away from the earth at a wee, small, minute, essentially insignificant rate.
"It also governs the tides. In the past of course the moon was closer. Causing the tides to be so strong that it would flood all of the earth twice daily. And not that long ago either."
That is untrue, however, even if it was true no mention of such a condition is made in your Bible. Global flood, yes, but a twice-daily global flood, no. So, while your making your case for YECism, you are denying the truth of your Bible.
"2) The earth is slowing down. They call it a leap second. About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year. If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster. You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old."
Hogwash. I quote from the Defender's Guide to science and Creationism site:
"[A]ccording to Chris Stassen, the rotation of the Earth has actually been slowing only 0.002 seconds per century. This means that in the Devonian period, there would have been around 400 days per year, which in fact corresponds to the approximately 400 daily growth layers per year present in Devonian corals. But Stassen points out that even this rate becomes
much less accurate with increasing time (particularly back to near the origin of the Earth). There are still arguments over the forces which dominate the slowing, and how much stronger or weaker they would have been when integrating backwards in time. (Stassen 1997).
Stassen recommends as resources Thwaites and Awbrey 1982, Cazenave 1982, Bursa 1982, and Mignard 1982."
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"Oil has been shown to be made from just about anything in the matter of a few moments."
Sure, one can express oil from many substances. It doesn't take long to make corn oil from corn. You may be interested to learn that not all oil is exactly the same. Crude oils of the types pumped out of the ground for use as fuels and lubricants take millions of years to form in a natural setting.
[...]
"And the half life cannot be accurately determined as we have no knowledge of what decays faster in the past as we aren't sure of the environment or atmosphere which science can tell you would play havoc on the half life."
The half-life of what?
...Correct me if I'm wrong, but couldn't you throw, say, Carbon-14, into an active volcano, and it would still decay at the same rate? I seem to remember something about half-lives being uncorruptable...
@Shep
...if oil can be made from just about anything then just why are Oil companies spending so much money on exploration and drilling the stuff up from inhospitable environments ?
Because the current method is a hell of a lot cheaper.
Scott: you are correct, generally speaking. I suppose, if you started bombarding the sample with neutrons, you might change the half-life, but that has more to do with the fact that you are initiating nuclear fission.
"2. The leap second is because the earth's rotation period is actually 23.9345 hours, but we think it's easier to claim that we've got 24 hours and skip a second every once in a while. If the second was because the earth was slowing down, we'd have to skip more and more seconds every year."
No, it's due to a length of a year. A day is 24 hours, an hour being sixty minutes, and a minute being sixty seconds is because an hour is defined as 1/24th of a day, a minute is defined as 1/60 of an hour, and a second is defined as 1/60 of a minute.
You're confusing it with sidereal day, I think, which is the amount of time it takes for a star to be in the same location in the sky again.
1) The moon is leaving the earth.
Yes, this is true. When first formed, most likely when the proto-earth collided with another proto-planet, the moon was only about 14,000 miles away. If the rate of escape has been fairly constant from that position to its distance of almost 239,000 miles today, you would find that it calculates out to several billion years. And what is this? Well, looky here. It is estimated that the moon was formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Well, go-o-olly. Funny how that works out isn't it. Used your own arguement to shoot a hole in your argument. Oh, and the tide thing; yes the tides would have been several hundred feet high at that time. Not enough to flood the whole planet, mind you, but since there was nothing but perhaps some microbial life that lived in the oceans at that time anyway, it wouldn't have made a damn, anyway.
2) The earth is slowing down.
True again. It is thought that the collision I mentioned above that formed the moon caused the earth to rotate at a speed of about once every 6 hours. However, the entire planet was molten due to the impact and gravity would have kept anything from "flying off into space." When the earth began to cool, and because the moon was so close, it didn't take but a few million years for it to slow to the 24 hour/day speed. And while it is still slowing down, the rate of deceleration is much, much, less than the 1 second per year that you mention.
The rest of your post is just stupid.
<<< Can you give me one piece of evidence toward the earth being older then 6000 or so years in age? Mind you I am going to combat your eviendence. >>>
I can give you several thousand. For starters, how about 250 different samples taken from non-geologically active areas, all measured to be about 4.5 billion years old (give or take a few tens of millions)?
<<< 1) The moon is leaving the earth. It i sgetting farther away each year. It also governs the tides. In the past of course the moon was closer. Causing the tides to be so strong that it would flood all of the earth twice daily. And not that long ago either. >>>
You are extrapolating linearly back millions of years based on a century of data. This is a bad idea. Zoom in close enough on any continuously differentiable curve and it will appear to be a straight line. Furthermore, there are very good physical reasons *NOT* to believe the rate of escape is constant or anywhere near it.
<<< 2) The earth is slowing down. They call it a leap second. About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year. If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster. You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old. >>>
You are extrapolating linearly back millions of years based on a century of data. This is a bad idea. Zoom in close enough on any continuously differentiable curve and it will appear to be a straight line. Furthermore, there are very good physical reasons *NOT* to believe the rate of slowdown is constant or anywhere near it.
(This got so much easier when I found that it was the same mistake over and over. Hooray for cut-and-paste!)
<<< Oil has been shown to be made from just about anything in the matter of a few moments. >>>
Evidence, please? If that were true, there's no way in hell it would cost $80 a barrel, because anyone who needed some could get it made cheap.
<<< And the half life cannot be accurately determined as we have no knowledge of what decays faster in the past as we aren't sure of the environment or atmosphere which science can tell you would play havoc on the half life. >>>
No, science will tell you that it would *NOT* play havoc on the half-life. Radioactive decay is based on a quantum-mechanical behavior known as tunneling - basically, the unstable isotope is in a local energy minimum because in order to get to a lower energy state (the daughter isotope) via classical processes, it must first gain energy. However, quantum physics says that depending on the size of this energy barrier, there is a fixed probability at any given time that the atom will "tunnel" through the barrier and move to the lower-energy state. This gives rise to an exponential decay process. By careful measurements, it is possible to determine the half-life - and this half-life is NOT dependent on other conditions.
<<< Wrong. The leap second thing has more to do with the fact that a year's not exactly 24hrs long. >>>
The Earth *is* slowing down in its rotation, but not as much as this person seems to believe.
Well, Crosis covered this pretty thoroughly, so I'll just add my $.02 to a couple of things he said.
"Zoom in close enough on any continuously differentiable curve and it will appear to be a straight line"
It gets even worse if it's not continuously differentiable, but it is differentiable. Then, if you zoom in enough, you'll either get a straight line, or you'll get the impression that it doesn't exist at all...
"No, science will tell you that it would *NOT* play havoc on the half-life. Radioactive decay is based on a quantum-mechanical behavior known as tunneling - basically, the unstable isotope is in a local energy minimum because in order to get to a lower energy state (the daughter isotope) via classical processes, it must first gain energy. However, quantum physics says that depending on the size of this energy barrier, there is a fixed probability at any given time that the atom will "tunnel" through the barrier and move to the lower-energy state. This gives rise to an exponential decay process. By careful measurements, it is possible to determine the half-life - and this half-life is NOT dependent on other conditions."
This is not entirely true; there have been observed changes to the decay rate of, I believe it was, Beryllium-7. That's because it decays by electron capture, which is made more likely under conditions of high temperature and pressure. However, yeah, for all other methods of decay (and probably for electron capture in any elements heavier than, say, Iron), you can't really affect the half-life of an isotope.
The supernova, SN 1987 A, has been measured at about 169,000 light years away. Since this was done by direct triangulation on the star and the wave front of the ball of radiation as it moved out from the supernova and lit up surrounding space dust, it would be hard to explain by silly stuff like "the speed of light must have changed". Besides, why would a perfect God need to fiddle with the whole basic structure of the universe after he created it? The Gnostics asked a similar question 1,800 years ago.
Analysis of the light spectrum, by the way, verifies that the radioactive elements created by the explosion decayed right on schedule 169,000 years ago just as they do today. None of these observations have been made by people with the slightest professional interest in proving evolution or disproving creationism ... they're just astronomers doing their jobs.
How does believing God created the universe billions of years ago, rather than 6000 years ago make me a nonbeliever....
Why does believing that God set in motion the forces of evolution, make me a nonbeliever?
???????
Seriously, i thought our faith was built on faith in Christ Crucified..... not halfbaked science and hyperliteral readings of Scripture.....
“2) The earth is slowing down.”
“They call it a leap second.”
This is incorrect. The earth IS slowing down,but at a rate that takes about 6000 years to accumulate one minute of change. At the time of Jesus, the day was 20 seconds faster.
"About every two to three years the earth spins one second slower per year.”
Total and complete bullshit.
The Leap Second is from errors in how the clocks measure Earth’s spin. We all grew up thinking the Earth’s Day was 86,400 seconds. it’s actually 86,400.002 seconds. On average. There’s an International Earth Rotation Society that measures each day’s difference in milliseconds, and publishes that for those who need precision.
And to keep the total error below 900 milliseconds, they institute a leap second where necessary. It’s been 9 years since our last leap second.
"If you look in the past the earth was spinning faster"
Or not. Could be like the tide, speeding AND slowing…
" You wouldn't have to go that far back and everything on earth would fly off into space because of the speed of the earth's spin thus proving earth can;t be millions and millions of years old.”
Just how fast would the Earth have had to turn for a person standing on it to reach escape velocity?
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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