Debate #1: Is Evolution science or not?

[dhiannian]

I suggest you private message her any evolution questions you have (with her permission).

Why do you believe the devil influences people to believe in evolution?

P.M who?
Because who does not want people to go to heaven?

 

[dhiannian]

Ah, so you just completely ignore the main point of the post? I suppose that's the only course when you're corrected.

Ok I'm sorry I'll say your stupid if you want..But I'd probably get reported.
J/k I have taken all into consideration, and how much are you willing to bet??

 

[Carmack]

PM gluadys (with her permission)

What does evolution have to do with salvation?

 

[dhiannian]

I like your name btw electric

 

[Electric Sceptic]

Ok I'm sorry I'll say your stupid if you want..But I'd probably get reported.
J/k I have taken all into consideration, and how much are you willing to bet??

And you still avoid the main point of the post...sad.

I'd bet a great amount of money that you either haven't, have but haven't understood the science you read, or haven't understood the creationist 'explanations' you read.

 

[dhiannian]

PM gluadys (with her permission)

What does evolution have to do with salvation?

EVERYTHING! and I wish so bad that people could see that!
It doesn't back up the bible, so it says the bible is false, does that make God false?

 

[dhiannian]

And you still avoid the main point of the post...sad.

I'd bet a great amount of money that you either haven't, have but haven't understood the science you read, or haven't understood the creationist 'explanations' you read.

Yeah it's sad I see no point, enlighten me if you would be so kind, what's you "point"

 

[Battie]

EVERYTHING! and I wish so bad that people could see that!
It doesn't back up the bible, so it says the bible is false, does that make God false?

I don't understand this. Are you saying that a person can confess that he is a sinner, have earnest faith that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior, but believe in evolution, and for that alone not go to heaven?

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i2/geology.asp

Like a fool I came back to look.
I realise this will likely fall on deaf ears but maybe something will penetrate for future consideration:
http://www.physics.niu.edu/~morphis/evolution/harm.html
and since you have cited Icons:
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wells/

And yes, the 13th century custom was to have a first name and a modifier, John of Surrey, Bill the Smith, or ... Robert the Pilegrim. Family names were not widely adopted until much later.

 

[Lucretius]

http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v22/i2/geology.asp

I decided to check out that link you posted.

For most people, the discovery of fossilised wood in a quarry would not be newsworthy. However, some pieces recently found embedded in limestone alongside some well-known ‘index’ fossils ( see aside below ) for the ‘Jurassic period’ (supposedly 142–205.7 million years ago) have proved highly significant.

It is not generally realised that index fossils are still crucial to the millions-of-years geological dating, in spite of the advent of radioactive ‘dating’ techniques. Not all locations have rocks suitable for radioactive ‘dating’, but in any case, if a radioactive ‘date’ disagrees with a fossil ‘date’ then it is the latter which usually has precedence.

His statement and the aside below both say that belemnites and ammonites have not been ‘dated’. Unfortunately for him—they have. Here’s something you might want to look at.

Figure 1. Locality map showing the outcrop pattern of the Marlstone Rock Bed across southern and central England (ref. 1, main article).
Finding this fossil wood in Jurassic limestone suggested the possibility of testing for the presence of radiocarbon ( 14 C). Most geologists, however, would not bother with such tests because they wouldn’t expect any 14 C to still exist. With a half-life of only 5,570 years, no 14 C should be detectable after about 50,000 years, let alone millions of years, even with the most sensitive equipment. So this fossilised wood from the Marlstone Rock Bed of Jurassic ‘age’ had potential for testing the validity of the fossil dating technique underpinning modern geology.

This poor guy assumes the only type of dating is radiocarbon. He makes no mention of radiometric dating.

The Marlstone Rock Bed

The Marlstone Rock Bed is a distinctive limestone unit that outcrops from Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast of southern England, north-eastwards to just west of Hull near the North Sea coast (Figure 1). 1In many places, the top 5–30 cm (2–12 inches) or more of this bed has been weathered and altered, the original green iron minerals 2being oxidized to limonite (hydrous iron oxides), and also in a few areas the sand content is higher. In the past, the outcrop has been quarried frequently for iron ore or building stone.

Evolutionary geologists consider that the top three metres (10 feet) of the Marlstone Rock Bed represent the whole of the Tenuicostatum Zone, the basal zone of the Toarcian Stage, 1the last stage of the Early Jurassic. This ‘dating’ is based on the presence of the ammonite index fossil Dactylioceras tenuicostatum. 1

Thus the bed is said to be about 189 million years old according to the geological time-scale. 3

The bed is a few million years younger than he supposes.

Amongst the remaining quarries still ‘working’ the top of the Marlstone Rock Bed are the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill near the village of Ratley, on the north-western edge of the Edge Hill plateau, some 10_ km (6_ miles) north-west of the town of Banbury (Figures 2 and 3). Building stone, known as ‘Hornton Stone’, has been quarried there since medieval times. 4,5

A ‘dating’ test at Hornton Quarries

During two visits to the Hornton Quarries, it was established that fossil wood occurs alongside ammonite and belemnite index fossils ( see aside below ) in the ‘Hornton Stone’, the oxidized silty top of the Marlstone Rock Bed. The ammonite recovered in the quarries is Dactylioceras semicelatum (Figure 4), abundant in a subzone of the Tenuicostatum Zone.1 Fossil wood was actually found sitting on top of a fossilised belemnite (Figure 5), probably belonging to the genus Acrocoelites, a Toarcian Stage index fossil in north-west Europe. 6Many such belemnite fossils had been found during quarrying operations (Figure 6). Together these index fossils have, in evolutionary reckoning, established the rock containing them as being Early Jurassic and about 189 million years old. 1,3 Logically, the fossil wood must be the same ‘age’.

Go on…

Figure 2. Locality map showing the distribution of the Marlstone Rock Bed west of Banbury, and the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill near the village of Ratley.
Three samples of fossil wood were collected from the south wall of Hornton Quarries, one from immediately adjacent to the belemnite fossil (Figure 5) during the first visit, and two from locations nearby during the second visit. All the fossil wood samples were from short broken lengths of what were probably branches of trees fossilised in situ. The woody internal structure was clearly evident, thus the samples were not the remains of roots that had grown into this weathered rock from trees on the present land surface. When sampled, the fossil wood readily splintered, diagnostic of it still being ‘woody’ in spite of its impregnation with iron minerals during fossilisation.

Pieces of all three samples were sent for radiocarbon ( 14 C) analyses to Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Boston (USA), while as a cross-check, a piece of the first sample was also sent to the Antares Mass Spectrometry Laboratory at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), Lucas Heights near Sydney (Australia). Both laboratories are reputable and internationally recognised, the former a commercial laboratory and the latter a major research laboratory.

The staff at these laboratories were not told exactly where the samples came from, or their supposed evolutionary age, to ensure that there would be no resultant bias.

Both laboratories used the more sensitive accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) technique for radiocarbon analyses, recognised as producing reliable results even on samples with minute quantities of carbon.


Figure 3(a) General view of the south wall of the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill near Ratley, north-west of Banbury.

(b) Closer view of the quarry face of the south wall showing the oxidized limestone of the top of the Marlstone Rock Bed which is quarried as ‘Hornton Brown’ building stone.

The results

The radiocarbon ( 14 C) results are listed in Table 1 . Obviously, there was detectable radiocarbon in all the fossil wood samples, the calculated 14 C ‘ages’ ranging from 20,700 ± 1,200 to 28,820 ± 350 years BP (Before Present).

For sample UK-HB-1, collected from on top of the belemnite index fossil (Figure 5), the results from the two laboratories are reasonably close to one another within the error margins, and when averaged yield a 14 C ‘age’ almost identical (within the error margins) to the 22,730 ± 170 years BP of sample UK-HB-2.

Alternatively, if all four results on the three samples are averaged, the 14 C ‘age’ is almost identical (within the error margins) to the Geochron result for UK-HB-1 of 24,005 ± 600 years BP. This suggests that a reasonable estimate for the 14 C ‘age’ of this fossil wood would be 23,000–23,500 years BP.

Before calibration, yes. C14 age and calendar age are different things.

Quite obviously this radiocarbon ‘age’ is drastically short of the ‘age’ of 189 million years for the index fossils found with the fossil wood, and thus for the host rock.

Of course, uniformitarian geologists would not even test this fossil wood for radiocarbon. They don’t expect any to be in it, since they would regard it as about 189 million years old due to the ‘age’ of the index fossils. No detectable 14 C would remain in wood older than about 50,000 years. Undoubtedly, they would thus suggest that the radiocarbon, which has been unequivocally demonstrated to be in this fossil wood, is due somehow to contamination. Such a criticism is totally unjustified ( see aside two ).

Don't they know trying to date wood that is millions of years old with C-14 dating will give faulty results? ??

Conclusions

The fossil wood in the top three metres of the Marlstone Rock Bed near Banbury, England, has been 14 C ‘dated’ at 23,000–23,500 years BP. However, based on evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions, the ammonite and belemnite index fossils in this rock ‘date’ it at about 189 million years. Obviously, both ‘dates’ can’t be right!

Furthermore, it is somewhat enigmatic that broken pieces of wood from land plants were buried and fossilised in a limestone alongside marine ammonite and belemnite fossils. Uniformitarians consider limestone to have been slowly deposited over countless thousands of years on a shallow ocean floor where wood from trees is not usually found.




Figure 4. The ammonite index fossil Dactylioceras semicelatum recovered from the top section of the Marlstone Rock Bed in the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill.

Figure 5. Fossil wood in the top section of the Marlstone Rock Bed exposed in the south wall of the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill. The pen is not only for scale, but points to an end-on circular profile of a belemnite fossil sitting directly underneath the fossil wood (sampled as UK-HB-1).

However, the radiocarbon ‘dating’ of the fossil wood has emphatically demonstrated the complete failure of the evolutionary and uniformitarian assumptions underpinning geological ‘dating’.

A far superior explanation for this limestone and the mixture of terrestrial wood and marine shellfish fossils it contains is extremely rapid burial in a turbulent watery catastrophe that affected both the land and ocean floor, such as the recent global biblical Flood.

The 23,000–23,500 year BP 14 C ‘date’ for this fossil wood is not inconsistent with it being buried about 4,500 years ago during the Flood, the original plants having grown before the Flood.

Sorry, but the flood was impossible, and never happened. It didn’t happen.

Figure 6. Four belemnite fossils, probably Acrocoelites, recovered from the top section of the Marlstone Rock Bed in the Hornton Quarries at Edge Hill (pen for scale). These cylindrical skeletal shells of the belemnites which taper to apices are called rostrums (ref. 2, of Index fossils and geologic dating, aside below).
A stronger magnetic field before, and during, the Flood would have shielded the earth more effectively from incoming cosmic rays, 7so there would have been much less radiocarbon in the atmosphere then, and thus much less in the vegetation. Since the laboratories calculated the 14 C ‘ages’ assuming that the level of atmospheric radiocarbon in the past has been roughly the same as the level in 1950, the resultant radiocarbon ‘ages’ are much greater than the true age. 8,9

Thus, correctly understood, this fossil wood and its 14 C analyses cast grave doubts upon the index fossil ‘dating’ method and its uniformitarian and evolutionary presuppositions.

The supposed water canopy theory is one of the stupidest I’ve ever heard of. IT IS WRONG!

On the other hand, these results are totally consistent with the details of the recent global Genesis Flood, as recorded in the Creator’s Word — the Bible.

Unfortunately, wrong.

This site proved nothing.

 

[aeroz19]

We have a debate: is Evolution science or religion? No interference allowed. Let the debate begin. My position is that it's a religion. My opponent says Evolution is a part of science. We shall see who's right and who's wrong.

Evolution is a science. Why? Because science is the gathering of factual, objective information about the world around us. Evolution states that all living things occasionally have a mutation, and that natural selection is the process by which that mutation continues or dies out in the population.

Some of the things that social scientists, or even scientists themselves, claim to know about social evolution, or even the history of evolution, however, are not true. People get over-enthusiastic all the time about evolution and where we have come from and where we are going, and they come to conclusions that the data do not support. It happens a lot. And this is the religion of evolution.

However, evolution in and of itself is not a religion, but is a science. It's just a science, people, like the laws of gravity or the speed of light or other simple stuff. Why do we get so worked up about evolution and remain calm when we read about gravity!

 

[MQTA]

True you can take a theory and make it fit the facts, and move everything around so that it does seem to fit, but it doesn't and is still a theory,
Scars? You mean like the grand canyon??example please.

Oh no guys!!
I'm having a revelation!! No a THEORY!
I say, a momma martian, and a daddy martian, crashed they're ship into the planet, thousands of germs flew off of the martians when they hit!
Then they fixed their ship and left, meanwhile,

Great theory. Perhaps lots of DNA samples landed here via comets, meteorites and asteroids?

They land on other planets too, but this one was fertile territory.

 

[Tomk80]

Yet? If as much evidence exists as it needs, why haven't we found it over 100 years ago? It's not a fact now, it will NEVER be a fact.

Indeed, the theory of evolution will never be a fact. It is only a shame that, while your statement on that is correct, you don't know the reason why it is correct, especially since multiple people on this board have tried to teach you that. But it's the same every time, you refuse to listen to others.

 

[Robert the Pilegrim]

Studies of the natural fission reactor near oklo push the constancy of those constants to over two billion years and looking at absorption of quasar light pushes it nearly to the age of the universe.
http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2004/pr-05-04.htm

For those who are interested in the amount of change or lack thereof I went back and looked for another article of a study from earier than the above one.

To quote from the European Space Organization (ESO) press release I cite above what is being looked at is "the so-called "fine structure constant", alpha = 1/137.03599958, a combination of electrical charge of the electron, the Planck constant and the speed of light. The fine structure constant describes how electromagnetic forces hold atoms together and the way light interacts with atoms."

An earlier experient cited at:
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:astro-ph/0210531
and published in Astrophys.Space Sci. 283 (2003) 565
showed that:
"da/a = (alpha_z - alpha_0)/alpha_0 = -0.57 +/- 0.10 x 10^{-5}"

That is to say that the change in alpha over roughly 10 billion years is less than one part in 100,000.
Please note that this was viewed as a huge change.

Again quoting from the ESO press release: "The result of this extensive study is that over the last 10,000 million years, the relative variation of alpha must be less than 0.6 part per million."

And those limits were imposed by the limits in accuracy of the experiment, more precise measurements are being planned using somewhat different methods.

Quoting them about oklo:
"Over the 2 billion years, the change of alpha has therefore to be smaller than about 2 parts per 100 millions. If present at all, this is a rather small change indeed."

But even if the earlier numbers had been correct, while the would be pretty earth shaking for physics, a change of 5/1,000,000 over the life of the universe brings no joy to creationists who need changes of something like 10,000/1 (yes, 10,000/1, not 1/10,000) to make the physical data fit their particular interpretation of the Genesis.

 

[MQTA]

Interesting, very interesting!

 

[corvus_corax]

I don't understand this. Are you saying that a person can confess that he is a sinner, have earnest faith that Jesus Christ is his Lord and Savior, but believe in evolution, and for that alone not go to heaven?

I'd like to know the answer to this as well.
I'll even throw in "...but believe in evolution and the Big Bang..."

 

[The Lady Kate]

EVERYTHING! and I wish so bad that people could see that!
It doesn't back up the bible, so it says the bible is false, does that make God false?

Only if the Bible was God...Which, of course, it it not.

 

[gluadys]

Exactly..See guys this one gets it!

But do you?

The careful study of God's creation shows indisputably that a young-earth interpretation of scripture cannot be correct, for it contradicts the evidence of nature. Ditto for a literal, global flood.

However, the careful study of God's word in scripture shows that it can include interpretations which allow for an old earth, a local flood and evolution.

So why do some Christians persist in clinging to interpretations of scripture which are falsified by God's general revelation: the material creation? Especially when scripture flat out tells us to look to creation as a source of revelation.

 

[gluadys]

EVERYTHING! and I wish so bad that people could see that!
It doesn't back up the bible, so it says the bible is false, does that make God false?

Obviously, you have received and accepted a lot of foolish lies about evolution. It has nothing to do with salvation. It does not say the bible is false or that God is false.

God is Truth, the source of all truth. Those who turn their backs on the truth of evolution in the name of scripture do a disservice to scripture and to God since they deny what God reveals to us in nature, his creation.