How would you prove the Universe is old?

AV1611VET said:

Creatio ex nihilo is what you guys would call an "educated guess" --- or hypothesis.

It's not like we're formulating something out of thin air [pun intended].

When you start out with nothing --- then God speaks --- then there's a universe, it is hard to call it anything but creatio ex nihilo.

It sure beats saying, "In the beginning, our universe was contained within a pixel. Then the pixel expanded..."

You're more than welcome to falsify it if you can.

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Personally I would have called it "creation out of voice".

Besides, where did you get the idea that things started out from nothing according to the Bible?

As for the BB, you do understand that we have physical evidence for this? Not only do we have evidence for it, but we have books where it is written down. All you have is a book.



Regards, Roland

Ursie said:

Someone asked what my field is, bible study is certainly a major focus of my life. The others include photography and graphic design.

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When someone asks you what your "Field" is, they are asking about your profession; not your personal hobbies.

They wanted to know your qualifications were and just what it was you do for a living.

Bible study doesn't count.

AV1611VET said:

Creatio ex nihilo is what you guys would call an "educated guess" --- or hypothesis.

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An 'educated guess' (and even more so, an hypothesis) depends on limited availability of information about a subject, which being incomplete cannot of itself lead to a level of certainty — it's an opinion in other words. 'Educated' here is also key, because if it's a matter of science a good education in that subject is required. Without that, it's no more than a wild guess. If it's a matter of religion, there are so many origins myths it's difficult to know which one to choose, but making an educated guess you're talking about Genesis 1, where, as you say, God 'speaks' the world into existence. Now if you're partly on the way to YECism, then absolutely anything can be guessed up in wild attempts to match selected bits of science with what it says in the Good Book — no science and no intelligence required!

When you start out with nothing --- then God speaks --- then there's a universe, it is hard to call it anything but creatio ex nihilo.

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You don't start out with nothing, you start with God. Oh, I know, he didn't need to be created because God is and always has been — deus futurus usquequaque. What a cop-out!

It sure beats saying, "In the beginning, our universe was contained within a pixel. Then the pixel expanded..."

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Nothing like a pixel!

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the initial conditions and subsequent development of the Universe that is supported by the most comprehensive and accurate explanations from current scientific evidence and observation. As used by cosmologists, the term Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the Universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past (currently estimated to have been approximately 13.7 billion years ago), and continues to expand to this day.
Big Bang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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See that? Scientific evidence and observation! Your biblical six day 'spoken' origin for the world has no evidence and observations to support it. It is only a fable based on bronze age cosmology that these days a few people have somehow been persuaded is the Word of God. Ho! Ho!.

You're more than welcome to falsify it if you can.

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All the evidence, theological, historical, geological, biological and cosmological falsify the biblical creation myth.

What you have been trying to do, with your embedded age stuff, is to define things in such a way they can't be falsified, by crafting your own definitions. But your 'hypothesis' let you down badly, because you were unable to extend your "educated guess" to explain variable fossil dates, for example.

rjw said:

All you have is a book.

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Yup --- all 66 of them.

Mike Elphick said:

Your biblical six day 'spoken' origin for the world has no evidence and observations to support it.

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Ain't that a pity ---

AV1611VET said:

Mike Elphick said:

Your biblical six day 'spoken' origin for the world has no evidence and observations to support it.

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Ain't that a pity ---

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What's that supposed to mean? Penny drops — maybe it's supposed to go with your challenge:-

AV1611VET said:

You're more than welcome to falsify it if you can.

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Are you saying [it's been contrived so] it can't be falsified? Is that why your thumbs-up appears to me to be so smug?

laconicstudent said:

When someone asks you what your "Field" is, they are asking about your profession; not your personal hobbies.

They wanted to know your qualifications were and just what it was you do for a living.

Bible study doesn't count.

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I'm sorry my answer was so unclear to you. I am a professional photographer and graphic designer. I am also the director of Women's Bible study at my church. Perhaps that means nothing to you, but it is meaningful to my church body and to the Lord whom I serve I can assure you. Being paid for a job does not somehow make one more qualified to do that job though, just for the record. The same is true of having degrees. How many non-degreed people are out in the world doing the same job and degreed people and doing them quite effectively? Many! They usually aren't being paid what they are worth, but they are doing the jobs all the same.

mindlight said:

OK
My gut feel on uniformitarianism is that the guys never lived through a storm at sea. Catastrophism is rapid and often unpredictable in its effects and unreadable in its consequences at a later date because of the ways in which it messes with the evidence.

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You misunderstand what uniformitarianism means in a geological context, it doesn't preclude catastrophic events, in fact many geological horizons are catastrophic events frozen in time, it just precludes all the earth's geology being formed by a catastrophic event, that is plain silly as any geologist will tell you because many geological horizons, and indeed whole classes of rocks, can only be formed through uniform processes.

Chalk would be a good place for you to start with your googling.

The flood theory of geology was falsified around 200 years ago by Christians searching for evidence of the biblical flood. They were honest enough to admit that the evidence didn't show this.

An interesting man to google would be James Hutton, a member of the Scottish enlightenment and friend of Hume and Adam Smith et al the first man to do a proper study of geology and hence discover deep time. Imagine being the first man to really understand that the Earth wasn't thousands of years old but..... well look at my signature.

One of the greatests scientific ideas of all time. He started off by considering sedimentary rocks, how they were made, he observed run off from the fields of his Scottish farm, he then observed that it would take a long time to turn that sediment run off into the sea to rock and he subsequently noted there areas where you could see multiple, seperate phases of this process going on with uplift between - google Siccar Point or Hutton's Unconformity - this made him realise the Earth was older than he could imagine. When we got to the 20th century and the discovery of radio active decay which we know to have been constant for at least 2 billion years - google Oklo natural nuclear reactor - did it become clear just how old the Earth was and I think that was a shock to most scientists, it wasn't just hundreds of millions of years old it was billions of years old.

I work at sea and I have lived through many storms at sea and one Typhoon and I know that they generally mean squat in terms of the future sedimentary record. what get preserved in the geological record is the consequence of many different inputs and chance. My father writes papers on this very subject, the unpredictability of geology, it is a fascinating subject google Dr R J Bailey, although you may need access to pay sites for many of his recent papers.

No rational person who has studied the science can possibly doubt the Earth is around 4.6 billion years old and the universe 11-13 billion years old. I know you will struggle with this but your answer that optical telescopes are poor and therefore aren't accurate enough to measure the depths of teh universe shows how far out of your depth you are so far, no one would use an optical telescope for this.

At least you have a lot of fascinating science to learn, good luck

Ursie said:

Being paid for a job does not somehow make one more qualified to do that job though, just for the record. The same is true of having degrees.

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If someone told you that exposure time and the fstop have no effect on the final picture would you think they were a qualified photographer?

In these discussions we read posts from people who demonstrably have no idea what science is, much less what it has discovered. These same people feel they are qualified to tell the rest of the scientific community that they are wrong. They are the equivalent of a person who doesn't even know what an fstop is telling a professional photographer with 30 years of experience that they don't know how to take pictures.

Can you get a feel for the frustration that we experience?

mindlight said:

My view is that if you understand something profoundly then you will be able to explain it in accessible language. So go ahead prove to me that the universe is old.

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It's pretty easy, actually. There is a lot of stuff in the universe, and you need space to fit it all. The perfect example is the Hubble Deep Field pictures.

"Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the Hubble Deep Field image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime 75 feet away."

HubbleSite - NewsCenter - Hubble's Deepest View of the Universe Unveils Bewildering Galaxies across Billions of Years (01/15/1996) - Introduction

In just a tiny, tiny sliver of the sky we see hundreds and hundreds of galaxies. GALAXIES, not stars. Each galaxy is made up of millions and billions of stars. That requires a LOT OF SPACE. Given the constant speed of light and the fact that we can see these galaxies leads to an unavoidable conclusion, the universe is quite old.

Loudmouth said:

In these discussions we read posts from people who demonstrably have no idea what science is, much less what it has discovered.

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We tell a lot of people they're wrong, without knowing exactly where they stand.

Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, Muslims --- it doesn't matter.

And you guys are no exception.

AV1611VET said:

We tell a lot of people they're wrong, without knowing exactly where they stand.

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And without knowing the facts or understanding their argument. That's my point.

It's a perfect example of how creationists play fast and loose with the facts. If they are willing to do this with easily checked facts then what are they willing to do with things that are not so easily checked?

Loudmouth said:

It's a perfect example of how creationists play fast and loose with the facts.

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I don't play with "facts" though.

I refuse to --- it's not my style.

My style is what I suppose you could call Resort to Authority and Refutation by Antithesis.

Ursie said:

Actually, there is a great deal more to being saved than simply 'accepting' Him as Lord and Savior.

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Really?

Mark 16:16 said:

Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

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Luke 7:50 said:

Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."

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John 10:9 said:

I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. He will come in and go out, and find pasture.

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Acts 2:21 said:

And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

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Sounds like all you have to do is believe in Jesus. Biblical literalism isn't mentioned.

Loudmouth said:

Can you get a feel for the frustration that we experience?

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Doubtful.

The Earth undergoes astronomically dependent climate oscillations which are reflected in the Earth's sedimentary formations. In addition to the effects of lunar cycles and solar cycles, there are variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit. Sedimentation cycles can therefore be used to re-construct astronomical timescales

More than a century ago, just before the invention of radiometric dating, G. K. Gilbert realized that astronomically forced cyclicity in marine sedimentary archives can be used to estimate the duration of parts of the geological record. His estimates suggested that our planet was much older than the 100 million years (or even 20 m.y., by some accounts) that had been calculated by a thermodynamic cooling model of the Earth.

Gilbert linked his sedimentary cycles to perturbations in the Earth's orbit and rotation axis that are caused by gravitational interactions of our planet with the Sun, the Moon, and the other planets. These interactions give rise to cyclic changes in the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, with main periods of 100,000 and 413,000 years, and in the tilt (obliquity) and precession of the Earth's axis with main periods of 41,000, and 21,000 years, respectively.

<...>

While Earth scientists can read these archives to reconstruct paleoclimate, astronomers have formulated astronomical solutions that include both the solar-planetary system and the Earth-Moon system. With these astronomical solutions they compute the past variations in precession, obliquity, and eccentricity. As a logical next step, sedimentary archives can be dated by matching patterns of paleoclimatic variability with patterns in the computed astronomical curves. This astronomical tuning of the sedimentary record results in timescales that are independent of radioisotopic dating and are tied to the recent times through a direct match with astronomical curves. A major breakthrough came only during the last decades, when studies directed at establishing such astronomical timescales yielded unprecedented accuracy and resolution for the last 15 million years.
Breakthrough Made in Dating of the Geological Record

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A 3000 m long ice core, known as the GISP2, has been drilled through the Greenland ice sheet. Clear seasonal variations are recorded in the ice, and by counting these one can date the core. But it's not just a matter of counting visible layers, but of using special independent techniques that can reveal hidden climatic conditions at the time the ice was laid down:-

The seasonal variations are determined using a variety of independent techniques.

Variations in ice morphology
Since the sun shines only in the summer, different densities of snow form in summer and in winter. There are about 12,000 of these pairs (12,000 years) in the top portion of the core, though, through compression, these are not apparent at greater depths.

Electrical conductivity
During the summer months, more nitrate is formed in the atmosphere than during the winter, making summer bands on the ice slightly more electrically conductive.

Seasonal variations in dust
The Greenland wind is stronger in the winter and greater amount of dust are deposited along with the snow. The bands show seasonal variations back to about 127,600 years ago.

Volcanic ash
The wind spreads ash from volcanic over Greenland. The ages determined from the ice cores can be compared to the ages of known eruptions.

Oxygen isotopes
Owing to the isotope effect (the heavier isotopes of the same element are physically more 'sluggish'), when it comes to phase changes in water (ice, liquid, vapour) different temperatures affect isotopic composition. The extra mass of Oxygen-18 compared to Oxygen-16, though small, makes it a little bit slower to evaporate from the sea. Also when water vapour condenses, the molecules with the heavier isotopes tend to preferentially form ice crystals. Thus, colder winter air contains less heavy isotopes in its water vapour and this is reflected in annual bands in the ice. Due to diffusion in the ice this method is only good for dating the most recent 10,000 years.

Summary
Without using any radiometric date, the 120,000 annual layers of ice in the GISP2 ice core not only falsify the theory of a 6,000-10,000 year old Earth but also the idea there was ever a global flood, 4,000 years ago.

I invite Christians to read Paul Seely's paper "The GISP2 Ice Core: Ultimate Proof that Noah’s Flood Was Not Global".

Mike Elphick said:

The Earth undergoes astronomically dependent climate oscillations which are reflected in the Earth's sedimentary formations. In addition to the effects of lunar cycles and solar cycles, there are variations in eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit. Sedimentation cycles can therefore be used to re-construct astronomical timescales



".

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Hi Mike,

My father has written a series of recent papaers debunking the idea that orbital forcing has a large and predictable affect on stratigraphy.

He has shown that most of the papers showing this use circular reasoning, they expect to find sequences based on orbital progression and so they find them, but theye are just pulling peaks out of the back ground noise that fit in with the Earth's cyclicity.

He has shown that statistically the vast majority of these claims are bunk

If you have access to scientific papers through a university try googling Dr R J Bailey and orbital cyclicity.

He has shown that in all but a very few cases orbital forcing is not present, the rocks where you can see possible orbital forcing are ones like deep ocean sediments with little external input and very constant conditions.

You can't even show orbital forcing in relatively recent sediments.

If you are interested search out a few of his papers, I think he has an overview paper coming up in First Break or Leading Edge pretty soon

Baggins said:

Hi Mike,

My father has written a series of recent papaers debunking the idea that orbital forcing has a large and predictable affect on stratigraphy.

He has shown that most of the papers showing this use circular reasoning, they expect to find sequences based on orbital progression and so they find them, but theye are just pulling peaks out of the back ground noise that fit in with the Earth's cyclicity.

He has shown that statistically the vast majority of these claims are bunk

If you have access to scientific papers through a university try googling Dr R J Bailey and orbital cyclicity.

He has shown that in all but a very few cases orbital forcing is not present, the rocks where you can see possible orbital forcing are ones like deep ocean sediments with little external input and very constant conditions.

You can't even show orbital forcing in relatively recent sediments.

If you are interested search out a few of his papers, I think he has an overview paper coming up in First Break or Leading Edge pretty soon

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Hi Baggins,

Thanks for that. I was aware there were objections, but a large body of opinion still supports the idea and I thought it worth mentioning G. K. Gilbert, for historical reasons and some of the dates.

I can understand Milankovitch Cycles and the like, but I understand that even Fourier analysis doesn't properly pick them out from data that is thought to reflect the Earth's ancient climate, so I don't intend to go further down this particular avenue (especially after your post!) — though I do think it's interesting.

Unfortunately I don't have full access to scientific papers. Maybe you could PM me one of your father's papers?

AV1611VET said:

I don't play with "facts" though.

I refuse to --- it's not my style.

My style is what I suppose you could call Resort to Authority and Refutation by Antithesis.

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How can you "play with facts", when you're so obsessive over fiction?

You could've at least chosen a better written piece, though, like this:



Far less plot holes and contradictions.

Mike Elphick said:

Hi Baggins,

Thanks for that. I was aware there were objections, but a large body of opinion still supports the idea and I thought it worth mentioning G. K. Gilbert, for historical reasons and some of the dates.

I can understand Milankovitch Cycles and the like, but I understand that even Fourier analysis doesn't properly pick them out from data that is thought to reflect the Earth's ancient climate, so I don't intend to go further down this particular avenue (especially after your post!) &#8212; though I do think it's interesting.

Unfortunately I don't have full access to scientific papers. Maybe you could PM me one of your father's papers?

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I will do if it will accept it.

Nope can't seem to do it. I have them on hard drive in pdf format and I can't get them into a PM or email by copy and pasting.

If you PM me your email address I will send you his three most recent papers. The basics are easy enough to understand, some of the statistical nitty gritty is beyond me, he is a brighter man than me my dad

They are persuasive papers because they are scientifically and mathematically rigourous in a way that the science he is debunking isn't. Statistical analysis show claims for orbital forcing being present in the stratigraphy to complete hokum .

AV1611VET said:

Cabal, if you set your attitude aside for a moment, and take a real look at my posts, you'll see that it's not evolution, per se, that I discredit --- it is science.

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I've asked you before. Why don't you sell all your fancy electronics brought to you via "discredited" science, give the money to charity and find a cave on a deserted island somewhere? There you will be free from the temptation to use "discredited" science every single day of your life like you do now...