Age of the Earth

[Flames]

Pete:

Revert to the versus that I posted on Page 4 near the top. Please explain how these are not applicable.

 

[Pete Harcoff]

If God did not create man in his image, then why did he send Jesus to become a man. How did he become a man?? Why didn't Jesus have to go through evolution given that he wasn't conceived through natural options.

Do you believe God is a human? Or is it possible the "in His image" refers to something besides just biological makeup?

Also, why would God have man evolve over x amount of years and then drop a soul in him and then man sinned. original sin blah blah blah..

Why would God create via a literal Genesis, only to make it look like He didn't create via a literal Genesis?

 

[Pete Harcoff]

Pete:

Revert to the versus that I posted on Page 4 near the top. Please explain how these are not applicable.

They convey the message that God is the creator of everything.

So? No one is denying that God created the universe.

(And in the case of Mark 10:6, Jesus is specifically speaking about divorce, not creation.)

 

[Arikay]

So you believe it is an honest thing to do to rig the offer so that no one can win?

Edit: Just to note, the Begining of life is not part of the Theory of Evolution. Anyone who tells you that it is, either doesnt understand Evolution or is lieing to you.

 

[Jet Black]

If God did not create man in his image, then why did he send Jesus to become a man.

so God is a roughly 6 foot biped with a crossing wind and food pipe, appendix, naval and poorly designed vertebrae?

 

[Flames]

Arikay:

Do not challenge my moral value with the post about checking this out. I have never challenged this guy and so it is all hearsay that it is fraud. Correct, No?? Did you challenge him arikay?? It is his friends money and his contest and he can really do whatever he wants in his prerequisites. Right? I could offer you 250k to have a lab that 1. has proof that a life can spawn from a non-living. By proof, I mean physical and not theory. and 2. watch the non-living turned living evolve.

Who would take me up and succeed on this offer?

 

[Flames]

Jet black:

Depends I guess.

Jesus was God in Flesh though.

 

[goat37]

Arikay:

Do not challenge my moral value with the post about checking this out. I have never challenged this guy and so it is all hearsay that it is fraud. Correct, No?? Did you challenge him arikay?? It is his friends money and his contest and he can really do whatever he wants in his prerequisites. Right? I could offer you 250k to have a lab that 1. has proof that a life can spawn from a non-living. By proof, I mean physical and not theory. and 2. watch the non-living turned living evolve.

Who would take me up and succeed on this offer?

Define what you mean by 'life'?
The origin of life remains very much a mystery, but biochemists have learned about how primitive nucleic acids, amino acids and other building blocks of life could have formed and organized themselves into self-replicating, self-sustaining units, laying the foundation for cellular biochemistry.

Watch the living evolve? You and I are not alive long enough to 'watch' the living evolve, especially since it doesn't happen to the individual but rather to the population over a period of time (much longer than the average human lifespan)


Also, the problem with Hovind's challenge is that he deliberately put it out in public as a way to dupe those that have no data either way to lean toward the creationism side when there is no real evidence that supports it.
The majority of people are not very bright, and if they went to his website and saw "win 250K for proving evolution" but then sees that no one (even scientists) has ever won, they would begin to doubt evolution and start believing his tripe even though he has nothing that remotely supports his position. He twists science around so it reads what he wants it to say so he has an easier time tearing it down.
Hovind is a liar, manipulator, and should not be taken seriously.
He doesn't have science advisors, he has spin doctors.

 

[Nathan Poe]

Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves." because it has Nothing to do with the Beginings of the Universe"

To Arikay:

Time has everything to do with the origin of the universe. Unless you believe that the Universe is God and has always existed and doesn't need a definite beginning.

Space : Same as time really

Matter: This is key also, Where did the matter come from? Again, you cannot trace the origin of the universe unless you state that
A. it always existed or B. God created it, and the universe would then be another mystery if it was option A.

I think Arikay misspoke. The origins of time, space and the universe have nothing to do with evolution, yet Hovind demands such proof as part of his "evolution challenge."

Hovind is either idiotically ignorant about what evolution is and is not, or he hopes and prays that you are.

Really, science can't prove evolution. Not in an absolute sense. You know this though. Science is fallible, maybe only .01%, but still is fallible.

When you read the Bible, and decide what's literal, what's symbolic, and what God wants of you, how fallible are you?

That is what makes it science. Has any evolutionist here ever became the "devils advocate" and try to prove creation?? and vica versa with creationists??

I tried it once. Felt like intellectual suicide. There's a whole lot I'd have to ignore and dismiss for no good reason except to adhere to a dogma.

I believe that your motivated thoughts (influenced thoughts), will dictate the outcome of your belief to some extent. If you come into it believing that Evolution is 100% accurate or even 90% accurate, then you will be on a path no matter what common sense would tell you. I would say that you should at least say that it is a 50/50 shot at being accurate. Because it is either created by God or created by happenstance.

Really Flames, you're falling for the false dichotomy. "Either God did it or it was random chance."
Have you even read anything by Darwin? First of all, we're not talking about how life was created, we're talking about how it got to be what it is today. the Creationists POV has one answer for both: "Goddidit."

Science has separated the two issues. Darwin did not address the first question: "Where did the first life come from?" In fact, he attributed the origin of life to a creator God.
For the second question, however: "How did life get to be what it is today?" Darwin formed a hypothesis, then looked to see if the observable facts supported it. They did. So to explain how life went from whatever-it-originally-was to what we see now, he proposed the theory of evolution by natural selection, which he described in detail in his now (in)famous book, On the Origin of Species.

Look at that title again: On the Origin of Species. Not life. Species. Darwin, as I explained, had no interest in adressing the origin of life, but rather its current diversity.

side note. With all of our grand technology, how come we can't figure out how to make a non-living thing live??

Because Abiogenesis is separate from evolution. And what's your definition of "living", anyway? I've read some interesting articles about the development of Artificial Intelligence. Would you consider an AI to be "alive?"

Why were the conditions back however many billions of years ago any different then today. With science you should be able to manipulate the same hypothesised conditions and we should be able to lab-rat evolution.

We don't need to go back billions of years; we can see evolution in action right here, right now. Bacteria evolve to resist antibiotics; insects evolve to develop immunity to pesticides; that's evolution for you.

Why doesn't that kind of stuff happen. Why can't we figure out a way to have evolution begin again?? Anyway though...

We can't "start evolution again" because it never stopped in the first place. Life is in a constant change of change, although at a rate far too slow for creationists, who expect miracles-on-demand.
Isn't patience one of the cardinal virtues? Come back in about 50,000 years, and see what's walking around on this planet.

 

[Arikay]

Let me put this another way,

Do you think it is Honest or Dishonest, to write the challenge in a specific way to, 1) not be answerable, and 2) Not portray Evolution correctly?

It is impossible to meet his challenge and he knows it, Yet he presents it as if it could be answered, is this Honest or Dishonest behavior?

Arikay:

Do not challenge my moral value with the post about checking this out. I have never challenged this guy and so it is all hearsay that it is fraud. Correct, No?? Did you challenge him arikay?? It is his friends money and his contest and he can really do whatever he wants in his prerequisites. Right? I could offer you 250k to have a lab that 1. has proof that a life can spawn from a non-living. By proof, I mean physical and not theory. and 2. watch the non-living turned living evolve.

Who would take me up and succeed on this offer?

 

[Arikay]

Thanks, I did appear to have skipped a couple words, I thought them, does that count?

Evolution has nothing to do with the Origins of the Universe. Yes Evolution does Require Time, however how it got that time doesnt really matter.

Mr Bubbles Could have sneezed and the universe began, and the Theory Evolution wouldnt be effected, and Thus Hovind pretending the Theory of Evolution says how the universe was created, and that it was created without god is false.

 

[Jet Black]

Time, space, and matter came into existence by themselves." because it has Nothing to do with the Beginings of the Universe"

To Arikay:

Time has everything to do with the origin of the universe. Unless you believe that the Universe is God and has always existed and doesn't need a definite beginning.

Space : Same as time really

Matter: This is key also, Where did the matter come from? Again, you cannot trace the origin of the universe unless you state that
A. it always existed or B. God created it, and the universe would then be another mystery if it was option A.

are you saying that the currently held model of physics held prior to the planck time? if so then you are contradicting yourself, because the curent model basically says that it can't hold prior to the planck time.

Really, science can't prove evolution.

no but it can falsify it. it hasn't yet though, like it has with creationism.

Not in an absolute sense. You know this though. Science is fallible, maybe only .01%, but still is fallible.

what do you mean by this? the model could be wrong, it could be completely wrong, but what is fallibe about the method?

That is what makes it science. Has any evolutionist here ever became the "devils advocate" and try to prove creation?? and vica versa with creationists??

I do believe that many creationists, studying evolution (properly) and science have come to the conclusion that the universe must indeed be old, and that evolution does happen (cosmology and evolution are two distinct branches, don't put them both under the same umbrella please)

I believe that your motivated thoughts (influenced thoughts), will dictate the outcome of your belief to some extent. If you come into it believing that Evolution is 100% accurate or even 90% accurate, then you will be on a path no matter what common sense would tell you.

not really. remember the people who came up with these wacky theories were christians, looking for the literal truth of the bible in the universe around them, they couldn't find it, in fact they found quite the opposite.

I would say that you should at least say that it is a 50/50 shot at being accurate. Because it is either created by God or created by happenstance.

even if science is 100% correct, God could still have done it.

side note. With all of our grand technology, how come we can't figure out how to make a non-living thing live?? Why were the conditions back however many billions of years ago any different then today. With science you should be able to manipulate the same hypothesised conditions and we should be able to lab-rat evolution. Why doesn't that kind of stuff happen. Why can't we figure out a way to have evolution begin again?? Anyway though...

because of statistics. and the complexity of life, and the fact that the really primordial chemicals no longer exist. there is interesting work being done though into finding the smallest number of genes required for a living thing.

 

[Nathan Poe]

Arikay:

Do not challenge my moral value with the post about checking this out. I have never challenged this guy and so it is all hearsay that it is fraud.

Facts:

Hovind wants "evidence of evolution"
Hovind lists his criteria for such evidence.
Nothing in his criteria has anthing to do with evolution.

What conclusions can we draw?

1: Hovind is incompetent.
2: Hovind is dishonest.

Can we narrow this down?

From Hovind's offer:

"The offer is legitimate. A wealthy friend of mine has the money in the bank. If the conditions of the offer are met, the money will be paid out immediately. My word is good."

Hovind puts his own credibility at issue. Let's see how good his word really is:

"And, yes, life is made of ninety two basic elements ....." (Source: Hovind/Pigliucci Debate)
actually, the Periodic Table lists 116 elements. Hovind, who claims to have been a science teacher for 15 years, should've known this


"I did not even know what being a humanist meant. I was only sixteen, and the brain doesn't even start developing until about twenty." (Source: Hovind's book: Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution, Chapter 6)
Say what?!?

"The Smithsonian Institute [sic] has 33,000 sets of human remains in their basement right now as you are reading this. Many of them were taken while the people were still alive. They were so desperate to find missing links, so desperate to prove their theory that they murdered people to prove it." (Source: his book again, chapter 4)
Hovind has accused the Smithsonian of mass murder. Um, can we say "evidence," please?

"The Trail of Tears was where the Cherokee Indians were driven out of the Chattanooga area all the way to Oklahoma. One third of the entire nation died en route. That took place here in America as they were driven from their homes. Evolution is largely responsible for what happened to the Indians." (Source: the book again, Chapter 4)
Trail of Tears: 1838-1839. Origin of Species published, 1859. Gonna blame Darwin for what happened 20 years earlier?

Correct, No?? Did you challenge him arikay?? It is his friends money and his contest and he can really do whatever he wants in his prerequisites. Right? I could offer you 250k to have a lab that 1. has proof that a life can spawn from a non-living. By proof, I mean physical and not theory. and 2. watch the non-living turned living evolve.

Who would take me up and succeed on this offer?

The offer is rigged. Every self-respecting member of the scientific community knows this. Even fellow creationists avoid Hovind like the plague.

Observe Answers in Genesis's (a "respectable" Creationist organization, if such a thing exists) reaction to Hovind:

http://www.answersingenesis.org/docs2002/1011hovind.asp


And remember, Hovind tells us, "My word is good."

 

[Mechanical Bliss]

Billions of years old? Not according to true science!

What do these people know of so-called "true science" when they don't practice science at all? Science is about deducing the most logical conclusion given ALL available evidence. It is not about having a preconceived, fixed conslusion that will never be rejected no matter what and finding only that evidence that fits it and completely ignoring or lying about evidence that doesn't fit.

Notice also that this "article" lacks any facts whatsoever. No specific data, no numbers, no calculations, just emotional little anecdotes that start it off to hook the scientifically ignorant by appealing to their religious beliefs rather than to facts.

Furthermore, please find us ONE scientist who rejects the billions of years age of the earth based solely on the evidence who does not have strong religious convictions that distract from the facts. Then there might be some credibility.

The earth is only seen as ‘looking old’ because we all take unconscious belief systems to the evidence.

Pure nonsense. The only people using a belief system to twist and ignore evidence are these people:

...looking at the world through the ‘lens’ of the Bible (rather than the humanistic, evolutionized lens of our culture), that it ‘looks young’ (i.e. thousands, not billions of years old).

1) The continents are eroding too quickly.
If the continents were billions of years old, they would have eroded by wind and water many times over. Mountain uplift and other ‘recycling’ processes are nowhere near capable of compensating for this.1

Zero evidence to support this assertion especially with respect to uplift. There are places on earth like the Himalayas for example where uplift greatly exceeds erosion, and other places on earth where erosion is a primary process. Using an average value is meaningless when geographic specificity is necessary to consider. It's just another meaningless cursory analysis by incompetent creationists desperate to cling to a conclusion.

2) There is not enough helium in the atmosphere.

Zero evidence to support this assertion and still no numbers or data at all. Helium is still created in the earth and it does escape the atmosphere.

3) Many fossils indicate that they must have formed quickly, and could not have taken long time-spans.

Irrelevant. Whether some fossils can form quickly or not does not matter. A bone can fossilize rapidly and sit encased in rock for millions of years. Quick fossilization is just simply not relevant to the discussion.

[QUOTE}4) Many processes, which we have been told take millions of years, do not need such time-spans at all.
a) Coal formation.[/QUOTE]

...under unnatural conditions and using unnatural processes. Irrelevant.

b) Stalactites and stalagmites.

Only when you compare them to features that are not chemically comparabe.

c) Opals.

...under unnatural conditions and using unnatural processes. Irrelevant. A human mixing together chemicals is not the same as silica nannofossils forming opal. It's a completely irrelevant analogy.

d) Rock and fossil formation.

Of course nothing is given with respect to rapid rock formation. This is also an example of another cursory analysis done by incompetent creationists by trying to make specific instances represent a geologic record hundreds of meters thick representing a wide variety of depositional environments.

5) The oceans are nowhere near salty enough.

Zero evidence to support this assertion and still no numbers or data to back it up whatsoever. What is neglected, of course, is something called "residence time." After all, there are salt mines under Detroit for a reason. Furthermore, humans also remove salt from the oceans.

Despite some inevitable unsolved problems in such a complex issue (see below for why radiometric dating is not infallible), it is thus not hard to establish:

i) The reasonableness of believing what the Creator of the world says in His Word, the Bible, about the world being thousands, not millions or billions, of years old.

There is no "reasonableness" in believing a literal interpretation of an unsubstantiated religious text. Circular reasoning is not a scientific argument. Srike one.

ii) The fact that the earth neither ‘looks old’ nor ‘looks young’ as such—it all depends on the ‘glasses’ through which the evidence is interpreted. We all need to be aware of how much we have been conditioned by our culture to ‘see’ geological things as ‘looking old’.

False. The evidence dictates the old earth conclusion; not the other way around. It's not about conditioning at all. It's just a ridiculous excuse.

And of course there's nothing on radiometric dating as "promised." I guess they just didn't get around to it.


That article is full of nonsense, and it's nonsense we've seen countless times on this forum that gets copied and pasted over and over. And as usual, it's a creationist copying and pasting a link without any discussion to support it. It just reinforces my hypothesis that you probably know little about the science behind any of this anyway, so you go to a biased website that tells you what you want to hear and then post it hear without your own words as if that serves as an argument. It doesn't. We've seen this before, and you will not find a credible scientist who agrees with any of those points above.

Radiometric dating, closure ages for gases on earth, plate tectonics, and basic stratigraphy all disprove the thousands of years hypothesis. It was disproven nearly two centuries ago. And still zero YECists have actually responded to the points raised in the "Geological Sciences vs. YECism/Flood Geology" thread. Instead, YECists almost always post links from unscientific organizations to try to sidetrack the discussion.

 

[Jet Black]

The offer is rigged. Every self-respecting member of the scientific community knows this. Even fellow creationists avoid Hovind like the plague.

That is the beauty of his offer though. Hovind knows that what he requires cannot be provided by science. the offer is there only to appease his worshippers, not have any impact on anyone else at all.

1) he knows that anyone who might consider such an offer will read through it thoroughly, and have a sufficinet understanding of what science can provide to know that his offer can never be fulfilled, even with a complete theory of everything, one can still not say that God didn't do it.
2)he knows that all his worshippers will read the opening paragraph and not have sufficient understanding of science to know that his offer is unfulfillable, since he has educated them all in his own brand of false science. this keeps them buying his videos and seminar tapes, and sticking their hard earned money in his collection tray like the poor misguided fools that they are.

when he dies, I suspect that God will have some very stern words indeed to say to him about false preaching and so on.

 

[Jase]

Why would God create via a literal Genesis, only to make it look like He didn't create via a literal Genesis?

He didn't. He created it via literal Genesis, and thats exactly how it looks. God said He created everything already mature, plants, animals, man, the Earth etc. He put stars in the sky, already visible to the Earth. The only difference is the age. Since you don't believe in God's account of creation, you don't accept that He created everything already mature in less than billions of years, so you assume Genesis is wrong since you conclude that the Earth was created billions of years ago.

 

[goat37]

He didn't. He created it via literal Genesis, and thats exactly how it looks. God said He created everything already mature, plants, animals, man, the Earth etc. He put stars in the sky, already visible to the Earth. The only difference is the age. Since you don't believe in God's account of creation, you don't accept that He created everything already mature in less than billions of years, so you assume Genesis is wrong since you conclude that the Earth was created billions of years ago.

Nobody is 'assuming' the literal account of Genesis is wrong... it has been scientifically falsified, therefore it IS wrong.

God didn't say anything. Scientifically inept men SAID god said something... They had absolutely NO idea how life formed and most of how the natural processes of the earth worked, so they had to come up with an idea that would work in their minds. It was easier for them to believe that God created everything mature, because they didn't know or understand anything else. This is not the case today, where we can determine many causes, make accurate scientific predictions, determine age etc...

 

[Jet Black]

He didn't. He created it via literal Genesis, and thats exactly how it looks.

assuming you haven't read genesis and all copies of the bible have been hidden from you for your entire life, then how old do you think you would think the universe is? just looking at the evidence?

 

[Nathan Poe]

He didn't. He created it via literal Genesis, and thats exactly how it looks. God said He created everything already mature, plants, animals, man, the Earth etc. He put stars in the sky, already visible to the Earth. The only difference is the age. Since you don't believe in God's account of creation, you don't accept that He created everything already mature in less than billions of years, so you assume Genesis is wrong since you conclude that the Earth was created billions of years ago.

So on the first day, God created, let's say trees for example, that were brand new, not even one day old, but looked as though they lived for, say, a hundred years.

And he did the same with the other plants, rocks, animals, etc. And he did this on purpose: He wanted us to look at these things and think they were old, when in reality they were not.

Have I got it right?

Congratulations, you've just made God into a liar, and an author of confusion.

You have singlehandedly demolished Biblical literalism, faith in God's truth, and Chrsitianity in general.

Take a bow; you've earned it.

 

[Arikay]

Jase: Can you explain to us why god wants to trick us?

If he created things Mature he created them very mature, 750,000X older than they really are. Seems very deceptive to me.

Generally I have noticed that when ever creationists fall back on "he created it mature" they are strugling to try and come up with a reason that their ideas dont fit their own personal beliefs.