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ORIGINAL: gluadys

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn
I've always wondered this...if God is omniscient and if He was pleased with all He had made at the point of Genesis 1:31, why would He have created things just to have them change...or evolve?

Would an omniscient God not create HIS own creation completely, with no need for evolvement or change?

I would interpret that to mean that God finds change good. This is a point at which the biblical conception of God differs from the Platonic conception that was so prevalent during the early Christian era and from which the church borrowed a lot more than it should have.

For Greeks, like Plato and Aristotle, perfection was static. The motion which marks the world we see was interpreted as an effort to come to a state of perfection in which something could rest. And, of course, this also involved theorizing as to why things had fallen away from perfection in the first place.

The "God" of this belief is not recognizable in Yahweh, the God of the bible. It is an "it" not a person. An Absolute that is unaware of anything but itself. All things are drawn to its perfection and stillness, without it being even aware of them. For such a god there is no activity, no longing or desire, no history, no emotion or passion of any sort.

By contrast, the God of the bible is characterized by dynamic activity, by emotions such as love, mercy, anger and righteous indignation. This God is personal and in your face. This is a God that is fully aware of you and makes demands on you. And this is a God that is active in history.

A dynamic creation seems IMO to be very suited to a dynamic God. Why would such a God find a static perfection in which nothing ever happens "good"?

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn

How do you reconcile that to Hebrews 13:8 and Hebrews 1:2? We are shown, over and over in the Bible, that God is unchangeable. If we cannot rely on the absolute immutability of God, what hope do we have??? If we think He is a God that has allowed His creation to evolve, when he at one time declared it "good", how can we have a sure hope of anything at all? How can we be sure that the price Jesus paid for our redemption will continue to be good enough, regardless of how bad we become? How can we even know there is absolute Truth?

I'm just not seeing any biblical precedent for the God you describe. It paints God as being "relativistic".

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

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No, we can do better than guess. As Yamaguchi clearly knew, since he was pointing out one solution to reconcile the problem of cross-correlation artifacts. When he used ARIMA models to improve the matching, "A single bark date - AD 1647 - was found to have a t value significant at the 0.001 level." No need for guessing when you have 1 possibility.

I'm not sure whether you're reading the statistical results correctly. The p-values were all at the 0.001 level for all 113 matches.

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Agreed, but the deeper strata have a different isotopic ratio than shallower strata, and this top to bottom gradation shows a consistent gradient in isotopic ratio. An omnipotent creator can do as he/she likes, of course, but this hypothetical YE creationist has to accept this 'pseudo-appearance' of age as either a grand coincidence or a deliberate design element.

Mmm, sometimes. Not always. For instance, in the Grand Canyon, Rb/Sr measurements showed the Uinkaret lava flows (~1.3 billion years) to be older than the Cardenas basalts (~1.0 billion years), despite the fact that the Uinkaret flows extrude at the top of the Grand Canyon with some flows going down into the canyon, while the Cardenas basalts are beneath all the stratigraphic layers at the bottom.

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"Summary
The ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project does not strike a telling blow against the reliability of isochron dating. The conditions which caused the "false isochron" in this case are fairly well-understood, and easy to avoid by proper sample selection. In fact, the resulting age in this case may well be meaningful and accurate. The problem is not the age itself but rather Austin's sleight-of-hand in trying to pass off the result as necessarily the age of the flows rather than a minimum age of their source.

The attempt to abuse the meaning of a single contrived date -- which was produced only by a sample selection geared to dating a different event, and only for samples whose results were known by Austin in advance -- says a lot more about the level of competence or honesty in this creation "science" research program, than it says about the validity of isochron dating methods.

Even if given credit for discovering this case (which he clearly doesn't deserve, as his use of Leeman's data proves), Austin has only managed to "call into question" a particular sampling technique. However, this sampling technique was known by mainstream geologists to behave in this manner long before Austin published on the topic, and this behavior is often intentionally used by geologists. Austin was aware of this, as his 1988 reference to Faure shows."

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I found your answer to mushhead interesting. While I agree that it will be difficult to get an accurate reading using such a large-scale "ruler", I would point out that we haven't exactly had the luxury of checking that "ruler" against anything that can be unequivocally dated as 2 million years old or older...

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn

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ORIGINAL: gluadys

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn
I've always wondered this...if God is omniscient and if He was pleased with all He had made at the point of Genesis 1:31, why would He have created things just to have them change...or evolve?

Would an omniscient God not create HIS own creation completely, with no need for evolvement or change?

I would interpret that to mean that God finds change good. This is a point at which the biblical conception of God differs from the Platonic conception that was so prevalent during the early Christian era and from which the church borrowed a lot more than it should have.

For Greeks, like Plato and Aristotle, perfection was static. The motion which marks the world we see was interpreted as an effort to come to a state of perfection in which something could rest. And, of course, this also involved theorizing as to why things had fallen away from perfection in the first place.

The "God" of this belief is not recognizable in Yahweh, the God of the bible. It is an "it" not a person. An Absolute that is unaware of anything but itself. All things are drawn to its perfection and stillness, without it being even aware of them. For such a god there is no activity, no longing or desire, no history, no emotion or passion of any sort.

By contrast, the God of the bible is characterized by dynamic activity, by emotions such as love, mercy, anger and righteous indignation. This God is personal and in your face. This is a God that is fully aware of you and makes demands on you. And this is a God that is active in history.

A dynamic creation seems IMO to be very suited to a dynamic God. Why would such a God find a static perfection in which nothing ever happens "good"?

How do you reconcile that to Hebrews 13:8 and Hebrews 1:2? We are shown, over and over in the Bible, that God is unchangeable. If we cannot rely on the absolute immutability of God, what hope do we have??? If we think He is a God that has allowed His creation to evolve, when he at one time declared it "good", how can we have a sure hope of anything at all? How can we be sure that the price Jesus paid for our redemption will continue to be good enough, regardless of how bad we become? How can we even know there is absolute Truth?

I'm just not seeing any biblical precedent for the God you describe. It paints God as being "relativistic".

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ORIGINAL: iluvatar

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn

How do you reconcile that to Hebrews 13:8 and Hebrews 1:2? We are shown, over and over in the Bible, that God is unchangeable. If we cannot rely on the absolute immutability of God, what hope do we have??? If we think He is a God that has allowed His creation to evolve, when he at one time declared it "good", how can we have a sure hope of anything at all? How can we be sure that the price Jesus paid for our redemption will continue to be good enough, regardless of how bad we become? How can we even know there is absolute Truth?

I'm just not seeing any biblical precedent for the God you describe. It paints God as being "relativistic".

No, it paints God as not reveling in stagnation. While God may not change, that doesn't mean He can't change his tactics or be swayed via petition. Abraham repeatedly asked God to change the criteria under which he'd save Sodom & Gomorrah and God agreed. The system of worship he set up in the OT is drastically different than the one in the NT. What's the point of prayer if everything is predetermined?

-Dan.

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ORIGINAL: drj11

How can a Christian believe in an unchanging God?

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Only when using the method that Yamaguchi was calling attention to as a potentially "suspect" method. When using his suggested ARIMA algorithm, there was only one match at p=0.001.

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Again, Dr. Austin's conclusions are disputed by other geologists:

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"Summary
The ICR's Grand Canyon Dating Project does not strike a telling blow against the reliability of isochron dating. The conditions which caused the "false isochron" in this case are fairly well-understood, and easy to avoid by proper sample selection. In fact, the resulting age in this case may well be meaningful and accurate. The problem is not the age itself but rather Austin's sleight-of-hand in trying to pass off the result as necessarily the age of the flows rather than a minimum age of their source.

The attempt to abuse the meaning of a single contrived date -- which was produced only by a sample selection geared to dating a different event, and only for samples whose results were known by Austin in advance -- says a lot more about the level of competence or honesty in this creation "science" research program, than it says about the validity of isochron dating methods.

Even if given credit for discovering this case (which he clearly doesn't deserve, as his use of Leeman's data proves), Austin has only managed to "call into question" a particular sampling technique. However, this sampling technique was known by mainstream geologists to behave in this manner long before Austin published on the topic, and this behavior is often intentionally used by geologists. Austin was aware of this, as his 1988 reference to Faure shows."

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There does seem to be a lot of skepticism hereabouts, so I made no dogmatic statements, and I explicitly admitted that we had no simple dating methods against which we can check K-Ar dating. Nevertheless, radiocarbon gets us out to 10,000 years with dendrochronology with good linearity. And varves takes it out to 40,000 with okay linearity. If there's even lousy uniformity with potassium-argon dating, so that it's off by a factor of 1000, that still provides earth ages in the millions of years. So even with error bars 100 times bigger than I think they are, these methods disprove naive Ussheroid chronologies by a factor of 1000 or so.

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn
God tells us to pray...that's why we do it. There is biblical precedent for God allowing man to intercede via prayer...Moses, Abraham, etc. God's truth and justice still prevailed in those situations. God cannot be swayed! Again, if He was not immutable, we would have no hope. God is the only "thing" that can truly be called unchangeable.

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There is no biblical precedent for God being changeable...in fact, we're told the very opposite in scripture. We don't want to serve a God that can be swayed or is given to change!

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And before a moderator tells us this is off topic...I really don't think it is. My point is, when God said His creation "was good", then it was...and it didn't need to be "tweaked".

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn
How do you reconcile that to Hebrews 13:8 and Hebrews 1:2? We are shown, over and over in the Bible, that God is unchangeable.

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If we cannot rely on the absolute immutability of God, what hope do we have???

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If we think He is a God that has allowed His creation to evolve, when he at one time declared it "good", how can we have a sure hope of anything at all?

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

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Only when using the method that Yamaguchi was calling attention to as a potentially "suspect" method. When using his suggested ARIMA algorithm, there was only one match at p=0.001.

Can you show specifically where? Because t values indicate 5 in the "good" range.

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10,000 is also kind of not impressive compared to, say, billions. The extrapolation is scientifically unsound. Not to mention that the processes involved in C14 accumulation and dating are completely different from the processes involved in the other forms.

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You can't say "well, this ruler here looks like it works for the first 3 inches, so I'm betting that tape measure over there is accurate to the full 240 feet!"

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ORIGINAL: drj11


So prayer is useless then? Unless prayer is nothing more than self conciliation, God has to be sway-able, or changeable.


Then why do you pray?

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'Good' only with the method that Yamaguchi is calling into question and attempting to improve. Middle of p.51, using his preferred method: "A single bark date - AD 1647 - was found to have a t value significant at the t = 0.001 level" - the same thing I quoted in post #44.

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That's right, uranium and potassium based methods are unaffected by the atmospheric changes that make radiocarbon dating somewhat more complicated.

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The first 3 inches of radiocarbon dating already disprove an Ussherian age of the Earth. The other tape measure, based on similar assumptions to radiocarbon dating, even if wrong by a factor of 1000, still yields ages that disprove an Ussherian age by a factor of 1000. There is a factor of 1,000,000 between radiometric ages and YE ages. The actual experimental data shows a change consistent with 0% change in decay rates over the past century. For the sake of argument, I'm willing to grant an error of 100,000%, and this still disproves YEC by an enormous margin. The actual error appears to be less than 10%.

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Would an omniscient God not create HIS own creation completely, with no need for evolvement or change?

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

Of course there's a 0% change in decay rates. Decay rates are basically constant given a closed system. I've never argued that point. The question is whether or not environmental injection rates are constant, which requires atmospheric equilibrium, which demonstrably does not happen.

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Unfortunately for you, I am somewhat bored and procrastinating on learning Silverlight at the moment

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They need to get their acts together, do some double blinds

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Atmospheric changes only really affect radiocarbon dating (which is why the calibration curves are so helpful in improving the method). No lead or uranium is transpiring into or out of rocks. As you mentioned before, lead may come out of melted zircons, and your point about contamination is very true. Nevertheless, the factor of a million difference between radiometric ages and Ussheroid ages can't really be swept under the rug with these minor quibbles about the method.

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It can only be swept away with a major quibble, such as your example of an omnipotent deity popping the universe into existence 5 seconds ago with the isotopic ratios as they are. In this case, radiometric dating would be worthless (although we could never discover that fact, since the omnipotent deity made the universe in such a way that suggests a great age).

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No, if anyone is unfortunate, it is the person having to deal with a Microsoft product!

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I don't know of any for geological samples, but the dating of the Shroud of Turin was double-blinded and carried out by 3 independent laboratories, and they included three control samples: medieval cloth, Nubian linen, and Egyptian mummy wrappings. The measurements weren't identical, but showed pretty good agreement between the 3 labs, and between the measurements and the more-or-less known historical ages of the control samples.

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ORIGINAL: Zhi
Right, but since we can't short-term test the long-term radioisotopic stuff, it's basically impossible to verify.

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Just by saying that the long-term radioisotopic tests are even performable, you have already entirely discounted any possibility whatsoever of YE theory being correct, because the time scales involved are just that different.

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Or had other reasons for doing so, or we're just misunderstanding the data.

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I mean, we just finally figured out what the appendix is for last year.

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

Just by saying that the long-term radioisotopic tests are even performable, you have already entirely discounted any possibility whatsoever of YE theory being correct

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Even for isotopes with half lives in the millions of years you can still measure thousands of decays in a matter of minutes with a large enough sample. One must remember that there are 6.022 x 10^23 (short hand 6.022E23 for future reference) atoms per mole (Avogadro's number). Just for fun, let's do the math.

For 40K the halflife is 1.25E9, or 1.25 billion years. In that time half a mole will decay for 3.011E23 decay events. For one mole of 40K that calculates to 2.4088E14 events per year. Dividing by 365 days that is 6.6E11 events per day, 2.75E10 events per hour, and 4.58E8 events per minute. That's 458 million events per minute from one mole of 40K which is 40 grams. From 40 milligrams one would get 458,000 events per minute. This is just back of the envelope math, so please check it. Also, I am sure one needs to run a differential to get the actual count, but it is still possible to get quite a few events from a small amount.

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Nature has already done those experiments. One example is the naturally occuring nuclear reactors at Oklo in Gabon, Africa. If the radioactive decay was the same in the past as it is now then these nuclear reactors should have specific ratios of byproducts of that decay. That is exactly what is found. Also, astronomers were able to measure the production and decay of cobolt isotopes in Supernova 1987a which is 168,000 miles away. The energy and half life of these isotopes are the same as they are here on Earth 168,000 years later.

For atmospheric fluctuations of 14C the tree ring, varve, coral doublet U/Th dating, ice layer data all give historical concentrations of 14C and cross correlate across many different continents and environments. The actual age and measured age can be matched up due to the annual characteristics of these data sets.

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The other problem with zircons being formed with lead already in them is that zircons can be found in sediment that overlay fossils. This means that these zircons were formed after life was already present on Earth. These can not be zircons that were formed at the time of creation, that is unless the Earth was created with fossils already in the ground which would cause some serious theological problems (one would think). So creationists must explain why there is a correlation between two independent and unrelated data sets: the ordering of fossils and the concentration of lead in zircons. For instance, how does a flood sort fossils so that they are only found in layers with zircons that have a specific ration of Uranium to Lead.

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We have known what the appendix does for quite some time now. The appendix is a part of the caecum which houses commensal plant digesting bacteria in herbivorous species. In humans the appendix serves a rudimentary and vestigial role.

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This is indeed the scientific position.

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

When you believe in an all-powerful being, anything can happen. Quite literally.

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ORIGINAL: Peter_Gunn

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ORIGINAL: Zhi

When you believe in an all-powerful being, anything can happen. Quite literally.

But that's exactly what evolutionists refuse to admit.