Evidence

[3sigma]

I don't.

Really? Worship is reverence offered a divine being or supernatural power. So you don’t revere your God? Do you admire it? Do you respect it? Do you try to follow its teachings? Genesis 7:21-23 claims that your God killed every fetus, baby, toddler and child on the entire planet so just how do you feel about this indiscriminate killer of babies and children?

 

[AV1611VET]

In my limited experience Fundamentalist Christians are at least as likely to have an abortion as anyone else

Who is more likely to have a beer?

Someone who has been taught that alcohol is the Devil's Brew, or someone who has been taught that alcohol is an adult beverage?

Again, emphasis on 'more likely'.

 

[Gracchus]

Who is more likely to have a beer?

Someone who has been taught that alcohol is the Devil's Brew, or someone who has been taught that alcohol is an adult beverage?

Again, emphasis on 'more likely'.

Who is more likely to get a divorce? Who is more likely to conceive a child out of wedlock? Well, I couldn't really say, but I have read that the divorce rate and the rate of out of wedlock pregnancies are higher in the "Bible Belt".

 

[AV1611VET]

Who is more likely to have a beer?

Someone who has been taught that alcohol is the Devil's Brew, or someone who has been taught that alcohol is an adult beverage?

Again, emphasis on 'more likely'.

Who is more likely to get a divorce? Who is more likely to conceive a child out of wedlock? Well, I couldn't really say, but I have read that the divorce rate and the rate of out of wedlock pregnancies are higher in the "Bible Belt".

What's the matter, Gracchus? Didn't like my example?

Playing Homo sapiens-see/Homo sapiens-do is much easier than answering questions, isn't it?

 

[Cabal]

Who is more likely to have a beer?

Someone who has been taught that alcohol is the Devil's Brew, or someone who has been taught that alcohol is an adult beverage?

Again, emphasis on 'more likely'.

Depends who's asking that question.

if it's us asking you, then we get <copout>"Well Christians get tempted more!"</copout>.

 

[AV1611VET]

Depends who's asking that question.

I am.

 

[juvenissun]

Yes.



Why not?



You just claimed it didn't exist. Why are you contradicting yourself?



mmm... Yes, there's also the slight problem that a global flood that submerged the landmasses would have been a mass-extinction event for aquatic life.

We do not know how to identify it.
If you can tell me how does a global flood deposit look like, then I can find many of it for you.

 

[MorkandMindy]

If a few thousand years ago someone spilt a cup of water somewhere it would not be surprising if no geological record of the event had been found

A second cup of water would not make it a geological event either, nor a third

And whether this water came from within the water cycle or came in to it from a volcano or a comet would also leave no evidence

Just because we have no evidence the flood didn&#8217;t occur doesn&#8217;t prove it didn&#8217;t

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

It turns out this is called 'the continuum fallacy' which is easier to understand than it is to spell.

A perfectly good example of 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' would be if someone 6,500 years ago spilt a cup of water. The inability of arkeologists to find evidence of it would not prove it didn't happen.

Now comes the principle of induction. Take a heap of straw, remove one single straw, is it still a heap of straw? Yes, therefore you can repeat this without it ever ceasing to be a heap of straw...

You can add another cup of water to the first one spilt and it would remain 'below the radar'.


Just as with the heap of straw, or determining when someone goes bald, the point is not usually well defined, but just because it has not been well-defined doesn't make it non existent.

Total submersion of the planet would leave lots of evidence. The 900,000 year sequence of annual precipitation bands in Antarctica would show it, human societies would come to an end, so for example hieroglyphics before the flood might be very different after, and pyramid building would cease owing to lack of manpower (the Flood came during the pyramid building era though not during the construction of a pyramid)

I am weak on biology but suspect that having just one male and one female ancestor would make a species susceptible to being wiped out by a disease, and leave a clear lack of variation. The situation with cheetahs is similar and it has proven possible to give skin grafts from one cheetah to another without rejection in around 50&#37; of cases. I'd guess the only reason the cheetahs haven't been wiped out by disease is there are so few of them and in such a limited area they have not yet met that particular disease.


The adage 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' may apply to spilling a cup of water event but it certainly can not be applied to a global flood even if we have been too lazy to draw a clear dividing line between the two.

 

[TheManeki]

Who is more likely to have a beer?

Someone who has been taught that alcohol is the Devil's Brew, or someone who has been taught that alcohol is an adult beverage?

Again, emphasis on 'more likely'.

As the saying goes, "Atheists don't recognize God, Jews don't recognize Jesus, and Independent Fundamentalist Baptists don't recognize each other in the liquor store."

 

[Doveaman]

If a few thousand years ago someone spilt a cup of water somewhere it would not be surprising if no geological record of the event had been found

A second cup of water would not make it a geological event either, nor a third

And whether this water came from within the water cycle or came in to it from a volcano or a comet would also leave no evidence

Just because we have no evidence the flood didn&#8217;t occur doesn&#8217;t prove it didn&#8217;t

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence

Is an adult snake evidence that the snake grew to adulthood, or could the snake have become an adult without having grown?

 

[Psudopod]

Is an adult snake evidence that the snake grew to adulthood, or could the snake have become an adult without having grown?

Depends, is there any evidence on the snake that it has grown to adulthood? Anything from scars to behavioual traits? If so this is a false histroy. It's not say that the snake couldn't have been created that way, as an omnipotent deity is more than capable of doing that. But you have to wonder about why. Same with the earth - there is a plentiful history going right back 4.6 billion years.

 

[Doveaman]

Depends, is there any evidence on the snake that it has grown to adulthood? Anything from scars

No scars.

to behavioual traits?

Baby traits.

Same with the earth - there is a plentiful history going right back 4.6 billion years.

This is only if our dating method is accurate.

 

[MorkandMindy]

...
This is only if our dating method is accurate.

if our dating methods are accurate

If the World is 4.6 billion years old then many aspects of the planet will show evidence of being operational for very long periods, some could go right out to 4.6 billion years.

Dating methods that indicate ages in excess of the Biblical start of 4008 BC:

The hydrogen/helium ratio in the Universe is around 75&#37; / 25% in many places as it has been from the start, though in some places stars have fused hydrogen into helium. In the centre of our sun a lot of helium has accumulated while the outside is at the primordial value. The amount of helium accumulated indicates an age of 4.6 billion years. If the sun was running a lot faster to make the helium faster it would have destroyed the Earth.

Were the fossils deposited by the Flood? No, there could never have been that amount of stuff alive at the same time, nor would you expect it to separate itself out into layers of warm sea fossils, cold sea fossils and land fossils etc the way fossil beds are arranged if it was all flood deposits.

The house I lived in was sitting on fossils, nothing else, and the sediment of dead ocean life at that point was 400 hundred metres thick and there are accumulations like that covering a substantial part of the ocean floor, in other words I wasn't on a part magically scraped together, but it is representative of the sedimentation rate. There are ancient structures on these South Downs so they haven't been accumulating since Stonehenge was built for example.

Ice cores show seasonal bands, some containing substantial dust from times with high winds back around the ice ages, and these cores go back up to 900,000 years

 

[Wiccan_Child]

This is only if our dating method is accurate.

They are. We have multiple methods to date the Earth which use a variety of unrelated physical phenomena. The oldest rocks on Earth date back to ~3.9 billion years ago, which, while not the true age of the Earth, nonetheless push it far beyond the claims of YEC.

 

[Doveaman]

They are. We have multiple methods to date the Earth which use a variety of unrelated physical phenomena. The oldest rocks on Earth date back to ~3.9 billion years ago, which, while not the true age of the Earth

So the earth is older than its rocks, almost a billion years older? What was the earth made of during that first billion years?

 

[Wedjat]

So the earth is older than its rocks, almost a billion years older? What was the earth made of during that first billion years?

You know when your third grade teacher told you there was no such thing as a dumb question?
She was lying.
For the record, when new igneous rock is formed, it "resets" the clock for dating.

 

[Wiccan_Child]

So the earth is older than its rocks, almost a billion years older? What was the earth made of during that first billion years?

Pretty much the same stuff. But the rocks during its earliest days are long since destroyed; they are eroded by the weather, pulled into the mantle by subduction, etc. So few rocks remain from that earliest time. Nonetheless, we have found rocks which date back about 3.9 billion years, which is long enough to refute YECism.

 

[Baggins]

As I have posted many times one single picture can refute YEC

106m of chalk

Chalk is formed by microscopic fossils of animals called coccoliths that lived in shallow warm waters.

That means sedimentation rates are not that difficult to estimate.

Typical chalk sedimentation rates are 30 m (100 ft) per million years

McGraw-Hill's AccessScience Encyclopedia of Science & Technology Online

The middle Eocene is represented by calcareous chalks, and calculated sedimentation rates are close to 9 m/m.y

Table T15. Linear sedimentation rates and mass accumulation rates, Hole 1260A.

4-20m/m.y.


That gives us a reasonable idea of the age of the 108m of chalk - between 3-27 million years, and some areas of Chalk in Southern England are much thicker than that.

This method of falsification of YEC doesn't need independent radiometric measuring, just estimations of the volumes of green algae that a shallow warm sea can support and the physics of settling of tiny particles in sea water columns.

YEC is ridiculously easy to falsify which is why Christian geologists did it 200 years ago, the fact that some people can cling to such anti-science to shore up their faith is a very interesting example of how the human mind works.

As an aside the chalk cliffs also falsify a world wide flood that laid out the whole geological record because chalks would be impossible to form in turbulent, murky, water.

I don't know why I bother really, because no one who as actually stood in front of a large geological cliff section and thought about it, as James Hutton did 230 years ago, could possibly believe in YEC unless they also believe in a god that practiced deception on a grand scale.

 

[Doveaman]

You know when your third grade teacher told you there was no such thing as a dumb question?
She was lying.

Thanks for the lesson. Very eye opening.

The earth was a ball of magma during the first billion years, then cooled and became solid 3.9 billion years ago. Thanks.

For the record, when new igneous rock is formed, it "resets" the clock for dating.

So the earth could be older than 4.6 billion years then?

 

[Doveaman]

Pretty much the same stuff. But the rocks during its earliest days are long since destroyed; they are eroded by the weather, pulled into the mantle by subduction, etc. So few rocks remain from that earliest time.

So how did we arrive at a date for the "earliest times".

Nonetheless, we have found rocks which date back about 3.9 billion years, which is long enough to refute YECism.

I suppose.