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kiwimac

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pantsman52 said:
Boohoo, he made a horribly ignorant statement and got ripped apart.

He is not ignorant simply uneducated. Ignorance describes, imo, a wilful state, "I don't want to know anything which contradicts my position..." whereas a lack of education can be remedied by a willingness to learn and a gentleness of spirit by those with something to teach.

Kiwimac
 
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gluadys

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kiwimac said:
He is not ignorant simply uneducated. Ignorance describes, imo, a wilful state, "I don't want to know anything which contradicts my position..." whereas a lack of education can be remedied by a willingness to learn and a gentleness of spirit by those with something to teach.

Kiwimac

Ignorance can be a wilful state, but is not necessarily so. The basic meaning is "not knowing" from the Greek "gnosis" (to know) preceded by a negative.

We are all born ignorant and remedy that condition by learning. But as we can never learn everything we all remain ignorant of some things.

Wilfulness comes in when we ignore someone or something in the sense of "refuse to acknowledge". In human relationships, to ignore someone who is trying to communicate with you is to turn one's back and refuse the communication. In science, to ignore evidence is to refuse to take it into account when developing a theory. And that is a betrayal of science.

So while we are all unavoidably ignorant is some respects, we can also choose ignorance by being unwilling to learn.
 
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wagsbags

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I have a webpage bookmarked on my other computer that's an organization of Christian Scientists explaining why Creationism is wrong. Unfortunately that computer is 1000 miles away, anyone know of the site? It explained very systematically why the arguments creationists use are flawed and presented the evidence for an old earth including radioisotope dating.
 
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wagsbags

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Ok here's a link from that site on radiometric dating. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/resources/Wiens.html it's somewhat technical and very long I recommend just looking at the graphs and captions under the graphs they'll get the idea across.

"Radioactive decay rates have been measured for over sixty years now for many of the decay clocks without any observed changes. And it has been close to a hundred years since the uranium-238 decay rate was first determined.
Both long-range and short-range dating methods have been successfully verified by dating lavas of historically known ages over a range of several thousand years.
The mathematics for determining the ages from the observations is relatively simple.

Beyond this, scientists have now used a "time machine" to prove that the half-lives of radioactive species were the same millions of years ago. This time machine does not allow people to actually go back in time, but it does allow scientists to observe ancient events from a long way away. The time machine is called the telescope. Because God's universe is so large, images from distant events take a long time to get to us. Telescopes allow us to see supernovae (exploding stars) at distances so vast that the pictures take hundreds of thousands to millions of years to arrive at the Earth. So the events we see today actually occurred hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago. And what do we see when we look back in time? Much of the light following a supernova blast is powered by newly created radioactive parents. So we observe radiometric decay in the supernova light. The half-lives of decays occurring hundreds of thousands of years ago are thus carefully recorded! These half-lives completely agree with the half-lives measured from decays occurring today. We must conclude that all evidence points towards unchanging radioactive half-lives."
 
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