OT - Questions about evolution

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tmack said:
Not if a truly supreme being exists. He could have planted dinosaur bones, but I don't believe He did.
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Dude, you can't grow a friggin' Chia-pet in seven days and the world was created in that time span? I'm a Catholic, but I'll freely admit that the Bible is not to be taken literally. Planting dinosaur bones? Woah.
 
EasyBigFella* said:
Dude, you can't grow a friggin' Chia-pet in seven days and the world was created in that time span? I'm a Catholic, but I'll freely admit that the Bible is not to be taken literally. Planting dinosaur bones? Woah.
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To us, yes, it's impossible. To a potential supreme being Who created everything we know and everything we don't know, Who was, is, and always will be, Whose existence and explanation are far beyond anything we can hope to ever grasp even a little bit of, it's possible.

None of us know, so it's a hypothetical, but "if," then "yes."

I'm a Presbyterian and I don't see how denomination matters. :shrug:
 
EasyBigFella* said:
Dude, you can't grow a friggin' Chia-pet in seven days and the world was created in that time span? I'm a Catholic, but I'll freely admit that the Bible is not to be taken literally. Planting dinosaur bones? Woah.
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Are you seriously comparing creation to a chia pet?

Dude.

The bottom line is that creation (however it happened) could have happened in an instant, or over millions and billions of years, or somewhere in between and we have no idea.
 
EasyBigFella* said:
Carbon dating of rocks shows the world is millions of years old, not to mention fossils, so yes, it is impossible.
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Actually all of the various radioactive decay dating methods make assumptions regarding what the initial concentration of any given isotope was when the object was "locked in" and thus the change in the observed isotope concentration can provide a clock to how long since the item has been "locked in".

These assumptions are normally reasonable, but they are nevertheless assumptions and so it is not impossible for them to be wrong.

For example, the assumption associated with carbon dating is that any thing that is being dated was interacting with their environment and the carbon contained within has the same ratio of C12 to C14 as we observe today. Once the animal died, or the object with organic material was buried it no longer interacted with the environment and so any change in the C12/C14 ratio is due solely to radioactive decay.

However, it is certainly possible that the C12/C14 ratio is not constant, or more precisely that the availability of C12 vs c14 in the environment may not be constant.

It is also possible that the item may not remain totally isolated from the rest of the world and that "newer" carbon could contaminate the sample.

There are similar issues with any of the other chronometric techniques used to date any object.

Now to be clear, I think that most of these methods provide useful data most of the time, yet they are not infallible and so their results don't mean that a date that does not agree with them is "impossible".

If numerous independent measurements all point towards the same conclusion, i.e., an age of the Earth greater than 3,000 years, then that is a very strong argument in its favor. However, that doesn't make the other idea "impossible".

After all, most of the chronometric methods simply give the age of the rocks, it says nothing about when they were combined to form the Earth.

I am not aware of any evidence for an age of the Earth being 3,000 odd years other than the calculation of Bishop Usher, and baring any further data to that effect, I find no reason to accept that hypothesis.

The evidence for the Earth being 4.5 Billion years old is numerous and compelling, therefore I use that as working hypothesis.

Yet both ideas are just that, hypothesis and so neither one is "impossible" since they do not violate any scientific law.
 
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