artintel wrote:
There Legio is beginning the real discussion - how do you measure the age? Thus far, mainstream scientists have been using a very limited number of dating methods. It's been shown that such dating methods are really arbitrary - all depends on the assumptions one begins with. At the same time, there are at least 120 other methods for dating the earth, universe, etc. e.g., sedimentary deposits on land, oceans, moon.
Can you give more detail about these methods, and the results they give? Is this the [url=
http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/877/]moon sediment argument[/url]?
Known dates for the formation of volcanic rocks (e.g., Hawaii) have been dated to be not in the dozens of years but billions of years?
The sample in question deliberately disregarded procedures for the lab it was tested at. All this demonstrates is that radiometric dating is not some magical procedure, where you put an arbitrary rock in and it spits out an age. Actually, relatively few rocks fulfil the rather stringent criteria to be able to give meaningful ages, and the situation in which a rock is found must be duly taken into account.
Also, it\'s important to use the proper measuring method for a given sample. Example: suppose you wanted to measure the distance between two houses on opposite sides of the street. You set up a mirror on one house and flash a lantern, starting a stopwatch at the same time. When you see the reflection, you stop the stopwatch and record the elapsed time. The distance is simply 150,000 km for every second.
Now, simply due to human reaction times, you\'re extremely likely to get an answer which is larger than the diameter of the Earth. Does this mean that \'long distances\' are a lie? No, it means you\'ve picked a bad measuring technique. Measuring a young sample by the decay of an isotope with a very long half-life is the same thing.
Speed of light? If the Big Bang theory is correct, then how fast was time moving during the first bang, where everything should have been exploding at speeds millions of times faster than the speed of light, and time, must have been changing at 'billions of years' in one of our contemporary seconds?
The BBT is well-supported by a wide variety of evidence, but it\'s a bit off-topic here. Still, I admit I\'m having great difficulty understanding what you\'re trying to say about time here. Time always passes at a rate of 60 seconds per minute to any local observer.
Anyway, the Earth, orbiting a third-generation star, was formed so long after the Big Bang that the BBT doesn\'t really have anything to add to the discussion at hand.
Conversely, the Bible records more specific historical detail than any other religious/philosophical ancient document about the origin and history of the Earth. The Creation week doesn't follow at all the alleged evolutionary time-table. Then why apply evolutionary concepts in determining what really happened in the original past, which cannot be tested for certainty today, because the beginning/original processes do not exist today.
The part I bolded is important: the Bible is a
religious/philosophical document, not a scientific one. It was simply never meant to tell us about these things.
