Kindest Regards, JIII!
Goodness, I didn't expect this thread to become a replay of an earlier thread discussing evolution vs. creation. We had great fun on that thread, but I suppose most of the newcomers may not be familiar with that discussion.
Dating techniques do, indeed, all have a certain margin of error. All of the factors you mention do have the effect of causing deviation, just as you say. No arguments there. However, I think that you are over-inflating the significance of these flaws.
Although dating methods certainly shouldn't be held as absolute truths, they are all more accurate than they are inaccurate, which is why they are used in the first place. Furthermore, in the case of well-established lines of research, such as paleontology, the estimates of the age of something like dinosaur bones has been checked in numerous ways using many different tests. Inter-field communication with geologists, biologists, and many other fields concerned with the gathering and testing of prehistoric data, are all taken into account, the results being compared, collectively re-interpreted, and clarified. The result...nothing we classically know as dinosaurs existed past somewhere around 65,000,000 years ago.
I am in general agreement.
Large reptiles, some very large, did exist after then, but not the creatures we mean when we talk about dinosaurs.
About the closest I can think of to illustrate "living" fossils is turtles / tortoises, alligators / crocodiles / caimans, sharks, coelocanths, and lung fish. There may be more, but this is the short list of those critters we discussed in the other thread.
I am very much aware of the 'power struggles' that occur in modern science. And, indeed, there have been quite a few instances over the course of history, and many which persist to this day, where new, revolutionary data has been rejected by mainstream science, which instead clings to its old assumptions rather than taking the leap into uncertainty that accompanies change. Absolutely.
Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions"
In theory, it's easy.
In practice, it's not.
Who have you been seeing and hearing? Certainly not the overwhelming majority of scientists in this world. The Earth is taken to be many billions of years old by just about every field of science which is in the least bit interested with such facts...astronomy, paleontology, geology, meteorology, chemistry, earth science, etc. All of these fields, and the vast majority of the scientists that carry them out, use those estimates with successful results, again and again. The age of anything vaguely human is not much more than one million years...we can even assume the greatest possible margin of error (which is pretty unrealistic), and say that scientists guess late by 5,000,000 years on the age of humans, and dinosaurs died out 20,000,000 years after scientists think. That still puts people in existence 39,000,000 years after dinosaurs died out. We could even allow for completely outrageous margin of error: say people existed 10,000,000 years earlier than estimated (10 times older than currently believed) and dinosaurs existed 40,000,000 years later than scientists believe. That still leaves a 14,000,000 year gap between dinosaurs and people, not to mention a strangely non-existant 50,000,000 years worth of fossil records.
This is probably the best explanation I have heard. Frequently, I end up speaking to those scientific dogmatists that hold the timeline as a rigid gospel of sorts, inerrant and immutable. Watching an argument between a religious fundamentalist and a scientific fundamentalist is a rather interesting show. Dogmatism against dogmatism...a religious war of words if ever there is one to see!
My only problem with most of your points is that you seem to hold science as if it is just one somewhat useful method for establishing knowledge...as if mythology interpretation is a practice just as capable as science of establishing factual information. This is plainly absurd.
I can sympathize with a desire to hold myth as truth, certainly I agree myth points to truth. "Myth" does not equal "lie." Neither is myth fully truth. Likewise, science is not fully truth either, it is another tool, like myth, that points to truth. There are elements to reality that science cannot register, cannot fathom, cannot hold, dissect and quantify. Elements that exist nontheless.
Science may only be a tool, and thus one that is subject to error and difficulty in implementation. But, as Carl Jung, himself, wrote: "Science is not, indeed, a perfect instrument, but it is a superior and indispensable one..."
I like this.
Science is not really under heavy obligation to explain the strangeness of the plethora of ancient mythologies, as things just as strange can be invented off the top of a creative writer's head everyday. Just because the North American Indian says the world began on a turtle's back doesn't mean that science must set out to conclusively prove that it didn't happen like that...or, for that matter, that science must address all various mythologies from every culture in the world to make sure they are incorrect. Science is not the enemy of man's knowledge, and it doesn't have any obligation to go head to head with every wild idea ever expressed by anyone.
Well, yes...with the caveat that religion is under no obligation to science, either. If anything, I find much more insistence of the latter in our generation. We've gotten beyond Galileo, now we seem beholding to Darwin, Einstein and Oppenheimer. Not to mention, how do we yet account for Quantum theory, and what place if any do we accord to the "scientific myth" of string theory?
You are correct in what you say about many of the ways that science may be flawed by deviation or old information, but you mistakenly interpret that to mean that science is only a tad bit more reliable than the proverbial 'shot-in-the-dark'. That is simply not the case, whatsoever.
Agreed again, with the caveat that while "formal" science is, compared with formal religion, quite young, nimble and flexible, it is in no way superior. There is a fundamental disconnect between the two disciplines, and in my experience I see only two places they may have to overlap: morality and love. Possibly a third: animating spirit. Beyond that, the two have little interaction with each other, and they cannot by their natures. One seeks answers to the question of "why," the other seeks answers to the question of "how."
What I'm saying here is that all scientific data points to dinosaurs dying out 65,000,000 years ago. The bones of dinosaurs that are found are all older than 65,000,000 years, some being much older. Yet, after that point...no more dinosaur bones. So...If 65myo old dinosaurs left enough bones behind to rebuild dozens of skeletons, wouldn't there be bones all over the place from dinosaurs that existed 10 million, 30 million, even 60 million years later? Where would they all have gone? A few accounts of 'out-of-place' artifacts simply aren't enough to account for the fact that we should've found 10 bones of more recent dinosaurs for every single bone of a 65myo dinosaur ever discovered. There just isn't a reasonable way to account for such a gap in the fossil record.
I am not employed in the field, just an interested armchair bystander. Having said this, I am wondering how "they" know about the interim species of mammals in those intervening millions of years if not for fossils? If the extinction was complete at 65 mya +/-, then the whole process would have to start over, which is clearly not the case. We know about interim creatures, so there are fossils (it would seem) in the interim, just not in the same abundance.
Interesting to me, is that the "global" catastrophy of 65 mya is not a "one off" event, there were cataclysmic events before and after, including a couple of doosies in recorded history. Seems there was a major event unearthed while looking at Moche Indian artifacts in Peru, and it seems I recall hearing of tree ring and ice core samples from Ireland and Arctic / Antarctic respectively that correspond to a major El Nino event around 550 AD, that lasted somewhere on the order of 50 years or so. Going by memory, I also recall an event called "the Maunder Minimum," (it's been awhile, 1400's ? iirc), when sunspot activity was non-existent and the Thames river regularly froze solid in winter for a period of about 100 years.
Our current "catastrophy" of global warming may be cause for concern, but is hardly unique or unprecedented in the history of the planet.
I do find interesting certain archeological hints towards what Alvis is hinting at in certain pottery among Peruvian indians. There are funerary artifacts of the pre-Columbian period that seem to depict humans interacting intimately with large reptiles. Reptiles large enough that we would instinctively think of them in modern terms as dinosaurs.
I have also personally looked at a set of footprints quite evidently to me laid down by a human being. Not three feet away running parallel in the same strata, were a set of junior sauropod footprints. I have heard the human prints explained away, rather lamely I might add, as selective erosion. I fail to see how, when there are plenty of other dino prints in the area that are very complete. Incidentally, these dino prints are authenticated well enough, a rather large collection of them are on display in a major New York museum. The site is in Glen Rose, Texas, should there be interest. Paluxy River.
Not that I wish to enter the debate again at this point between science and religion in this matter. However, I do agree there are certain subjects, issues and findings that formal science is more inclined to overlook. Occasionally there are things found that jeopardize the established dogma. Sometimes the evidence is overwhelming enough to rock the boat into submission, and science grudgingly acceeds. Other times it seems to me, where the evidence is a bit more sparse, there is not enough to rock the boat, and the status quo remains.
My slightly more than two cents tonight.
Had I known Dragons would become Dinosaurs, perhaps I should have included them in the initial post...?