Since my area is more geology than biology I homed in on the following:
Dr.J said:
They teach you Darwin in school, and then Bible in church. It sure gets confusing. But the only contradiction on this point is between Darwin and the Bible. The Bible never says there was a time when dinos lived and humans did not. That's what Darwin says! That's wrong.
Of course no actual data supports that dinosaurs were concurrent with humans. There are no fossil finds where humans are in with dinosaurs. This is key because whenever dinos are found is always in older rocks than where humans are found.
(Also I have to question whether Darwin said anything either way about humans and dinosaurs, but I don't know for sure).
Dr.J said:
These "long, long periods of time" stories ... just ain't necessary. Back in the 1960's, a volcano burped-up the entire island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland ... in just a matter of months. Unlike old-earth evolutionary events (which require imagination), young-earth creationary-type events can actually be observed. - Dr J
Indeed Dr. J. is correct that Surtsey did form quickly. What he fails to discuss is that the Hawaiian chain is an excellent record of slow plate movement. The chain tracks exactly along where the plate has moved over a hotspot. The older parts of the chain, the "Emperor Sea Mounts" are eroded below the level of the sea. The active islands are old enough to have established life on them.
In looking at the Hawaiian chain you see the neat package of island formation, erosion and plate movement.
What's even neater is that we know how fast the plates are moving not only because they are still moving today, but through dating the lava on the ocean floor and tracking magnetic field "flips" preserved in the basalt.
Dr.J said:
"Just wondering" is one of my favorite things, BTW. Carbon-14 would be good only back to 110 thou yrs ago ... even if all the assumptions it's based on were true. Evo's use other methods to date dinosaurs, and the Earth. They never check dino bones for C-14 ... but creationists have ... and found C-14 in every bone. This means they're only thousands, and not millions of years old ... not to mention the vein found in a t-rex bone 3/05.
Dr. J. is correct in pointing out that C-14 is not usable for extremely old materials (millions of years) owing to the half-life. However, I would be quite dubious of claims of valid 14C data from fossilized bones. Most fossilized bones of any real age are, as another poster pointed out,
replaced or
permineralized. Which means that little if any of the original material is left, but replaced by minerals like quartz or carbonates etc.
Now I'm not sure about all dino bones, I'm sure there may be some that still retain some of the original phosphates that make up much of bone, and obviously the recent finds of some organic preserved is interesting.
But again, the key is to take a look at the giant mass of data out there, and not focus solely on the
outliers of the data set.
For instance if I find ONE data point that is amazing and alarming and beyond all I could comprehend it should do little to shift the literally thousands and millions of data points that fall along the usual line.
When we have found many many fossil instances of preserved dino blood and organics, and these are properly tested and consistently show really young ages we will still have to face the gigantic mountain of data that does
not show such young age.
The earth is a big place and it has been explored by people with good and honest intentions. As I've said on many other occasions on this board, I've worked with a number of paleontologists and not one of them ever believed in an old earth and evolution to spite God. Many of them were religious people, themselves.
The only reason anyone would have for assuming the earth is approximately 6000 years old isn't found
anywhere in the planet we have before us...it is found in ONE PLACE and ONE PLACE ONLY...the Bible.
So you must wonder, is the
entire planet wrong or are the first couple chapters of one book in the Bible wrong?
