History of viruses is a proof of creationism

[Brightmoon]

you’re talking about radiodating done by Andrew Snelling and other creationists to discredit deep time . Putting it as gently as I can, the only reasons for what he did were either ignorance, deception or incompetence.

you see when you date a young rock with a technique normally used on very old rocks , you’ll get an answer of this rock is younger than X . Snelling used a 50 year old rock . The creationists gave the already ground up sample to the lab ( red flag #1 and this is what Barbarian was posting about)
( red flag # 2 ) they used a technique used on billion-year-old rocks on a 50 year old one . This is like asking someone the time , expecting an answer in hours and minutes and being told that it’s June . ( it’s June 20 today) . Or like using your car odometer to measure a yard ( meter) The answer isn’t wrong ,it’s just not useful. If you use the wrong measuring tool you’re going to get useless answers. Snelling was told that the 50 year old rock was dated to younger than 2 million years . Which it is , but that doesn’t give you a useful age. The problem is Snelling reported it as , har har these dumb scientists said this 50 year old rock is 2 million years old .
That was the last creationist paper I read because I was so angry and embarrassed by the dishonest shenanigans by fellow Christians

 

[The Barbarian]

A claim blindly accepted by so many but actually not what happened. They were aware of the ancient bits of rock and catered for that.

No, you can't "cater" for that. It will give anomalous ancient dates for young rock, as it did. The creationist knew the rock was contaminated, and knew it would give an erroneous date, but submitted the sample, anyway. Would you like me to show you?

Both of which are interpreted radically differently by those who believe a global Flood was responsible for these patterns and that Mt St Helens is a proof of rapid rock layer formation as a burst lake created sedimentary rock layers in a matter of hours.

There are many, many examples of such sudden layers. Geologists are not surprised by them. Varves, for example, form twice a year, and are useful for dating deposits. Catastrophic changes like a volcanic eruption can be even more sudden. Would you like to learn how geologists know these, from gradual deposits?

They do no such thing.

You've been misled about that.

If the apparent age of different rock types was the same going into the melt event then they could well appear the same age coming out also.

That means nothing at all. But the ratio of daughter isotopes to the original tells us what the age of the rock is. And we can check it with rock of known age. And the permeability of the rock to off-gassing or intrusion is easy to measure. There really is no excuse for denial here.

In the unanalogous case of the flood I doubt it.

Doesn't matter. Physics works the same way. And if you argue that God miraculously changed things, than any claim is equally valid, if you get to call in an unBiblical miracle to patch up the flaws in your ideas.

In the case of the fluid dynamic situation of a moving lava flow I would wonder how you would do that

Same way it's always done. The age of the rock is set at 0 when it hardens.

and how you would retrieve evidence from the pre lava state that had simply been burnt away

For example, organic matter in limestone would be turned to carbon dioxide and lost. But that's not what geologists use.

Might be, it would be useful to learn how the dating works. BTW, argon/argon testing accurately called the age of the eruption that buried Pompeii, so we do know that it works.

 

[DaveG12345]

To be honest this thread appears to be largely an intelligent debate between two people. There's little point in me trying to measure up to the technical details of carbon dating, you guys are clearly smarter than me in that regard. So, I'm just going to post based on the OP title.

I've been studying Near Death Experiences for a while now and learnt a lot about the kinds of questions people ask God when they pass over. I believe in God, but I also believe in evolution and the Big Bang Theory. There is just too much science and evidence to denounce such things. That being said, we don't know what we don't know. A being, God, that is infinitely intelligent and see's through the eyes of all living things in all the Universe is able to determine the course of existence. I believe in a deterministic existence, but I also believe God does not dictate the course of humanity, like the butterfly effect he just knows what's coming. We are given Free Will for a reason.

When the Bible was written I doubt the authors were experts in Geology and Cosmology. They had to record what they were shown or had seen in terms that could be understood at the time by the masses. Imagine trying to explain planet formation to someone two thousand years ago. I don't think we should take the Bible literally, we know better now, but that doesn't mean the authors didn't have the answers - they just didn't know how to comprehend them. Our challenge today is reconciling what we know now with what was written then.

In terms of viruses, I've thought long and hard about if Covid-19 is somehow part of Gods plan. Many people show their greatest most compassionate selves in the face of suffering and adversity. But equally, particularly based on my research, God would not bring forth anything that would hurt us - we do that fine all by ourselves. It does seem timely, especially with the United States falling deeper and deeper into division, families turning against each other over political affiliation.

I guess I'll just have to ask God when I get there...

 

[Brightmoon]

A lot of the damage now being caused in the USA by the virus is mainly due to a willingness to accept pseudoscience and feelings instead of facts. Denial, obstructing behavior , stupid political grandstanding and lies isn’t going to slow the spread of this.

 

[mindlight]

To be honest this thread appears to be largely an intelligent debate between two people. There's little point in me trying to measure up to the technical details of carbon dating, you guys are clearly smarter than me in that regard. So, I'm just going to post based on the OP title.

A great many smart people are actually quite dumb. I know a man with an IQ of 160 who does not think he needs to wear a face mask in a shop during the current Pandemic for instance. You should always test what you read.

I've been studying Near Death Experiences for a while now and learnt a lot about the kinds of questions people ask God when they pass over. I believe in God, but I also believe in evolution and the Big Bang Theory. There is just too much science and evidence to denounce such things. That being said, we don't know what we don't know. A being, God, that is infinitely intelligent and see's through the eyes of all living things in all the Universe is able to determine the course of existence. I believe in a deterministic existence, but I also believe God does not dictate the course of humanity, like the butterfly effect he just knows what's coming. We are given Free Will for a reason.

A great many believers accept evolution and Big Bang as the most plausible and consistent models for explaining origins, it does not mean they are not saved. IMO Creationists do not have a model with the same level of scientific consistency as has been ironed out in the Old Earth Evolutionist camp and Creationist claims are in effect more reliant on belief in miracles, the supernatural powers of God and a direct reading of scripture. I have a lower tolerance for claims to certainty on origins that are not based on scripture because the science cannot demonstrate the relationships between the various facts that are used for these theories to any level of certainty. Christians who accept evolution and Big Bang do not have same tolerance for uncertainty and intolerance of intelligent guesses that I have. Near death experiences also require a lot of interpretation and in the end rely on the testimony of the man who died , who observed clinical experiences carried out to revive him, or conversations between relatives over his clinically dead corpse. That said I trust the testimony of a friend who died an atheist and came back a Christian before it was too late.

When the Bible was written I doubt the authors were experts in Geology and Cosmology. They had to record what they were shown or had seen in terms that could be understood at the time by the masses. Imagine trying to explain planet formation to someone two thousand years ago. I don't think we should take the Bible literally, we know better now, but that doesn't mean the authors didn't have the answers - they just didn't know how to comprehend them. Our challenge today is reconciling what we know now with what was written then.

Your view is called Literary Framework theory and allows you to affirm God as Creator and yet also accept that the first few chapters of Genesis had a more metaphorical than literal meaning.

In terms of viruses, I've thought long and hard about if Covid-19 is somehow part of Gods plan. Many people show their greatest most compassionate selves in the face of suffering and adversity. But equally, particularly based on my research, God would not bring forth anything that would hurt us - we do that fine all by ourselves. It does seem timely, especially with the United States falling deeper and deeper into division, families turning against each other over political affiliation.

I guess I'll just have to ask God when I get there...

God created a perfect universe that was broken by the fall, flood, angelic fiddling and mans contempt for divine instructions. As with many deadly viruses that have jumped from the animal kingdom to mankind many of these may have been avoided if we had been more faithful to Gods word laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy for example relating to social distancing and ceremonial cleanliness when confronted with infectious diseases and if we had gleaned the right lessons from the food laws relating to what we eat and the care we put into its preparation.

I believe that God ALLOWED the current Pandemic as a rebuke to our pride and self sufficiency and to some extent because of the unmerited trust we place in things like medical science which as yet cannot save us from the current Pandemic.