The debate regarding the age of our planet...

Amergin said:
I will not enter this inane word game. It is a waste of time. The Genesis stories are tribal myths from the imagination of Bronze Age warlords to explain the Earth and human origins. It was not based on factual reality. It was based on the imagination of those warlords who claimed and possibly believed that the fantasy came from a God. He may have even experienced some complex hallucinations that led to the stories.

The creation myths (Gen 1 and Gen 2) clearly derived from much older but similar creation myths likely as old as the Palaeolithic Age. People could not conceive of numbers like millions or billions of years. Counting was most advanced as an abacus or lining up tribal members and counting their toes. All people want explanations so desperately that they will accept irrational myths by a prophet or warlord rather than be content with "we don't know."

Genesis 1 and 2 are valuable artifacts of Human social anthropology. They are part of Jewish Social anthropology.

The science is quite extensive. We can debunk a 60-century-old Earth with a single 4 billion year old rock from Labrador or Australia.

One does not need to spin the words of Genesis into incredible contortions to try to reconcile primitive myth and modern technology and science. Genesis is simply myth and valuable as part of Human Archaeology.

Perhaps the Earth (and Universe) was "without form" in the early universe seconds after the Big Bang. The Universe was homogeneous and purely energy. Shortly it began to clump by static electromagnetism, then clumps clumped by gravity and then energy clumped to form atoms...nebular clouds... mega stars...heavier elements...
Supernova... second generation stars...third generation stars... solar systems...planets including Earth.

No magic words of an imaginary being are evident.

Human maturity is the time when we examine mysteries that defy explanation by science. It is mature to admit, "I do not know."

Amergin
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What a wonderful summary of the facts. Plain, simple, so easy to understand that it beggars belief that every child does not leave school with such a basic set of premise in their world-view. No believer has a valid argument about the hard science that underlines your every point. Archaeology and Cosmology have no agenda, not even the consideration of trying to debunk religion. The debunking is a natural consequence of the endeavour to reveal accurate information. I know where I look for truth.
 
bob x said:
No. I am difficulty imagining what it is you even read, but obviously you did not understand what it was saying, because your statement is flatly absurd.
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Flatly absurd? I have been an amateur astronomer for 3 decades and in that time have seen an exponential growth in our understanding. If it has taught me anything it is this.... we have only so far looked at the tip of the tip of an iceberg of understanding.
Our knowledge of solar and planetary magnetosphere's is still in a pre-school stage. And quantum effects within them is not even a science yet. Yet you know enough to call it flatly absurd!
 
We know that the Universe is at least 13.9 billion years old. We also know the following rational ideas.

1. Earth is older than 4.5 billion years, as the oldest rocks prove. However we understand that Earth took a long time to accrete rocks that eventually heated by gravity and nuclear fission. The rocks we measure were once molten. When they hardened, we were able to measure their age. Earth may have been accreting for millions before the first rocks formed as the molten surface cooled.

2. We know all animals including human animals developed through Evolution, a natural selection of changing conditions leading to variations that succeeded. The idea that all humans descended from a single couple is biologically impossible and in my opinion, stupid. Remember that Stone Age savages dreamed up the fairie tales we call Genesis. I do not condemn them for their ignorance. They made up stories to explain the mysterious.

3. We know the Earth is a sphere and not the centre of the universe. Enough on that fact.

4. We know that consciousness and cognition (thinking) are products of complex circuits of neurons, axons, nerve terminals, synaptic neurochemical connections, receptors, and other neurons. Billions of these circuits are proven to be the thinking networks of the brain by many different neuroscientists. The idea of a soul is unnecessary. I do not deny souls but souls simply are unnecessary.

5. Steven Hawking has shown us the Universe going back to the Big Bang and how quantum science shows that something CAN arise out of nothing. Particle physicists show that subatomic particles pop into and out of nothingness all of the time. We do not need a Humanoid God to explain creation. God is unnecessary. He was early man's attempt to explain the unknown by the unknowable.

Bible literalists as shown by Diagoras, choose verses to form obviously false religious beliefs. The darker effect is that irrational faerie tales are used to block children from learning real science. Christianity produced the Dark Ages. Christianity set back human progress by more than a millennium.

I am shocked to see how backward and scientifically ignorant American young people and children have become. The great country, the USA is great in science and medicine because of an elite educated minority of less than 10% of the population.

Amergin
"God, Darth Vader, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn may possibly exist, but they are unnecessary to explain anything." - Me
 
shawn said:
Maybe it sounds absurd, but I am not making this up.
My comprehension is working better than your open mind which seems to be a tad closed.
Taken from this website:
symmetry breaking Blog Archive The strange case of solar flares and radioactive elements
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OK, I stand corrected then. But you were leaping from a finding that there is a variation that amounts to a small fraction of one percent, so that something which was dated 10 million years old might really be 9,970,000 years old instead, to saying that it is uncertain whether the world is a few thousand years old: this is what made me snap at you like you were one of those tedious "creation science" people. If science discovers that the average distance to the Moon is not 238,000 miles like they previously calculated, but more like 237,930 well then that is wonderful that science is refining knowledge; what it is not is evidence for "See! That proves that the moon landing was faked in the Arizona desert!" which is how you were coming across to me.
 
Dream said:
I've no quarrel with those who believe the earth is 4,000 years old, but with those who believe themselves rational. Rationality cannot be tested. Have you ever had a crush or been married? Was it rational, and are you a rational being? I don't agree with saying that some people simply refuse to understand, because there is no line between desire and hallucination. The more you desire something, the more you believe that it is. That is just straighforward brain chemistry. The old lie was that we were capable of rational thought, and it was a sweet thing to believe. The new belief is that we are capable of partially rational thought, completely rational in certain subdivided areas of our lives. It is also a sweet thing to believe. We believe that one area of our lives can be ruled by desire but that we can then live another part without desire interfering with our rationality. There is no basis for that belief except that we desire it to be so. Under the circumstances, we have no way of testing each other for rationality.
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Hear! Hear!
 
Amergin said:
We know that the Universe is at least 13.9 billion years old.
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No we don't. We "know" no such thing. That is our best guess, a best guess I might add that has changed many times over the last 40 years, and it will change again.

Amergin said:
Earth took a long time to accrete rocks that eventually heated by gravity and nuclear fission. The rocks we measure were once molten. When they hardened, we were able to measure their age.
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Nuclear fission? Hardly. If you had said Nuclear fusion, I might not have caught it. Volcanic melting "resets" the atomic clock on a rocks age...so this is incorrect.

Amergin said:
We know all animals including human animals developed through Evolution, a natural selection of changing conditions leading to variations that succeeded. The idea that all humans descended from a single couple is biologically impossible and in my opinion, stupid. Remember that Stone Age savages dreamed up the fairie tales we call Genesis. I do not condemn them for their ignorance. They made up stories to explain the mysterious.
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Where to begin? Evolution is still a process we do not understand, and I am not going to take the time to enlighten you here now. A lot of what is taught as evolution contradicts the facts in the field...so you are really beginning to sound like a fundamentalist. It was Bronze and Iron age savages that wrote the Old Testament, at least get your facts straight.

Amergin said:
We know the Earth is a sphere and not the centre of the universe. Enough on that fact.
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No its not, its pear shaped.

Amergin said:
We know that consciousness and cognition (thinking) are products of complex circuits of neurons, axons, nerve terminals, synaptic neurochemical connections, receptors, and other neurons. Billions of these circuits are proven to be the thinking networks of the brain by many different neuroscientists. The idea of a soul is unnecessary. I do not deny souls but souls simply are unnecessary.
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What is love? Chemicals and neurons? The "exact" same chemicals and neurons are involved with G-d, proven by mainstream science. Does love exist? If love does exist, then so does G-d, proven scientifically. If love doesn't exist, I suggest you do not tell your wife.

Amergin said:
Steven Hawking has shown us the Universe going back to the Big Bang and how quantum science shows that something CAN arise out of nothing. Particle physicists show that subatomic particles pop into and out of nothingness all of the time. We do not need a Humanoid God to explain creation. God is unnecessary. He was early man's attempt to explain the unknown by the unknowable.
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That's funny, all the astrophysicists I've read have mixed feelings on the subject. A lot of them think the universe will keep on expanding until it grows cold and burns out...no big crunch afterall. So much for dogma, eh?

Amergin said:
I am shocked to see how backward and scientifically ignorant American young people and children have become. The great country, the USA is great in science and medicine because of an elite educated minority of less than 10% of the population.
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And I'm to the point now where I just roll my eyes at all of the intolerant fundy bigotry around me in every guise and discipline...usually by groupies that don't really have a clue.

Amergin said:
"God, Darth Vader, and the Invisible Pink Unicorn may possibly exist, but they are unnecessary to explain anything." - Me
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Now if you could only find a way to explain anything the way it actually is rather than how you imagine it. It is popular opinion, widely reported, that the invisible unicorn is pink. Those in the know, that actually study these things, have realized invisible unicorns might actually be purple.
 
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juantoo3 said:
No we don't. We "know" no such thing. That is our best guess, a best guess I might add that has changed many times over the last 40 years, and it will change again.
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This is very pedantic and ironically falls to the same criticism you voiced. The date for the ageing of that area we refer to as our universe is getting ever more refined and just under 14 billion years is indeed the date the science reveals. This is done by reversing the observed extent of expansion to the point it must have all shared a common space. We are now at the point where we can look back by viewing the very deepest field objects to within 300 million years of that estimate. The physics tells us that our next generation of instruments should confirm with much greater clarity what we can already observe, that the deepest field galactic structures adhere to the primitive stage of evolution the theories predicted. It is easy to say science is always changing its mind because it is ever tinkering looking for greater refinement. But it is disingenuous to use this as you do to dismiss what is in fact a well studied and highly credible model.
Where to begin? Evolution is still a process we do not understand, and I am not going to take the time to enlighten you here now. A lot of what is taught as evolution contradicts the facts in the field...so you are really beginning to sound like a fundamentalist. It was Bronze and Iron age savages that wrote the Old Testament, at least get your facts straight.
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Again you fall back on pedantry revealing only that you do not have a stronger case. If you deny the evidence of the millions of observations that support the basic premise of evolution theory then you can have nothing less than a wilful ignorance. And please enlighten us what aspects of "taught" evolution are "in contradiction to observations in the field"?
No its not, its pear shaped.
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P......E.......D.......A.......N........T !
What is love? Chemicals and neurons? The "exact" same chemicals and neurons are involved with G-d, proven by mainstream science. Does love exist? If love does exist, then so does G-d, proven scientifically. If love doesn't exist, I suggest you do not tell your wife.
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Love is a part of the evolved biology of a large brained social animal. Love is a mechanism that evolved through the evolutionary selection of empathic individuals making a better job of living in socially cohesive groups, and thus out-surviving those that did not. People are loathe to relinquish their romantic association with the biological facts, that does not mean they are not fully understood by those that study the development of social communities in nature.
That's funny, all the astrophysicists I've read have mixed feelings on the subject. A lot of them think the universe will keep on expanding until it grows cold and burns out...no big crunch afterall. So much for dogma, eh?
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"So much for dogma"? Where is the universal crutch of dogma in science. By your very own words you cite its splits and divisions. These essential splits and divisions that are the driving force behind the new ideas that test our models. Why do you seem to see the very strengths of science, as well as the mark of its honesty, as a fault....when it suits you?
.usually by groupies that don't really have a clue.
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This begs the question...who's groupie are you?
 
the Torah has no problem with the universe being 14 billion years old, nor with evolution. as a religious jew and (i hope) as rational and scientifically-minded as i am educated enough to be, neither do i.

biblical literalists are idiots. virtually nobody really understands what's actually going on at all levels of the ma'aseh bereisheeth (Creation account/s) in any case and they're certainly not going to be able to establish credibility or authority in this field.

look, this is pretty basic stuff. the "days" "existed" before the "sun" and "moon" were "Created", so that ought to give you enough evidence even for the uneducated that we aren't exactly in literalist territory here.

b'shalom

bananabrain
 
Diagoras said:
This is very pedantic and ironically falls to the same criticism you voiced.
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Thank you for noticing. Give that person the booby prize! Do you think maybe I was dishing out a second helping right back at those who figured they were right to sling hash?
 
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Diagoras said:
If you deny the evidence of the millions of observations that support the basic premise of evolution theory then you can have nothing less than a wilful ignorance. And please enlighten us what aspects of "taught" evolution are "in contradiction to observations in the field"?
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Just some casual light reading for you, I suggest this first:

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/scientific-fundamentalism-11730.html

here's one,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/applied-anthropology-4598.html

another,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/morality-within-evolution-1360.html

another,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/evolution-question-9358.html

another,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/greatest-proof-of-a-lack-598.html

another,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/debate-on-science-11665.html

and when you are finished, I recommend this,

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/the-evolution-conflict-877.html

then I will graciously accept your apology for your prejudicial jump to conclusion.
 
I don't think it really matters if the Earth is 4000, 4 million, or 4 trillion years old. It is unlikely to have the slightest bearing on my life.

What bothers me is that there are people who think the Bible is a scientific text book when it is something far more valuable and useful.
 
bob x said:
OK, I stand corrected then. But you were leaping from a finding that there is a variation that amounts to a small fraction of one percent, so that something which was dated 10 million years old might really be 9,970,000 years old instead, to saying that it is uncertain whether the world is a few thousand years old: this is what made me snap at you like you were one of those tedious "creation science" people. If science discovers that the average distance to the Moon is not 238,000 miles like they previously calculated, but more like 237,930 well then that is wonderful that science is refining knowledge; what it is not is evidence for "See! That proves that the moon landing was faked in the Arizona desert!" which is how you were coming across to me.
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Fair enough.
And for the record, I am not one of those types of people who make such statements indicated above.
The info in the article I linked (Fermilab) indicates that this data has many people scratching their heads and seeking to find out the other implications of this find.
Some have gone so far as to state that if it happens now it most likely has happened before and we don't know how often or to what degree, so this does raise a lot of questions as to accuracy of previous "solid" statements.

It does look as though it will be developed into a reliable solar flare early warning device, and with CME's posing a danger to electronics on earth this would be nice to have.
 
juantoo3 said:
I only looked at the first link, it was an entire thread. If you think I am going to read through countless threads to try and understand your argument, or lack there of, you must be mad. Either put up, in your own words and with one or two relevant links, or hide behind a wall of undefined words which is obliviously just camouflage for having nothing at all. The choice is yours.
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Let's keep from personal attacks, please - we should be able to discuss civil issues with civility. :)
 
I said:
Let's keep from personal attacks, please - we should be able to discuss civil issues with civility. :)
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From what I have read here so far you have to post that on at least 20 more threads. The hatred for the non-believer is palpable.
 
Diagoras said:
From what I have read here so far you have to post that on at least 20 more threads. The hatred for the non-believer is palpable.
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Too true.
Better not kick any sacred cows by having an alternative viewpoint.....LOL.
 
Virtual_Cliff said:
I don't think it really matters if the Earth is 4000, 4 million, or 4 trillion years old. It is unlikely to have the slightest bearing on my life.
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True, true.

What bothers me is that there are people who think the Bible is a scientific text book when it is something far more valuable and useful.
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I'm with you. Heck, even the Roman Catholic Church doesn't claim that the Bible is scientifically accurate. :D To my mind, it teaches of a soul's evolution; to get bogged down with nitty-gritty details is to miss the greater message.
 
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