Thanks, unlerner, for an interesting essay.
I'll take it as your own work, likely copied & pasted from previous efforts, which would explain why so much of it, however interesting, seems to have nothing to do with the subject under discussion.
unlerner: "Supposing that the earth is billions of years old, the idea that life could have survived and thrived for billions or even hundreds of millions of years with no cataclysmic events that destroyed all life, would be MIRACULOUS."
Of course it's miraculous, the entire Universe is miraculous, intelligently designed and, in a sense, irreducibly complex.
And one of the biggest miracles, imho, is that the Universe was created in such a manner that we, feeble minded as we are, can understand many, if not all, of its natural processes.
In other words, the assumptions of methodological naturalism provide us with a large and growing body of explanations with great predictive and utilitarian powers.
unlerner: "A billion years. 175 million years. These numbers are deceptively simple... "
If we were talking about dollars in your bank account, you'd be less cavalier about the differences in such numbers.
unlerner: "Just to prove a point, try doing an approximation of say a billion light years (or use parsecs if you prefer) by triangulating from the annual stellar parallax of the earth’s orbit..."
That's the wrong tool for such large distances.
It would be like trying to measure the distance from New York to LA with a yardstick.
unlerner: "It is still practically impossible to assert with any degree of confidence that we are detecting starlight from billions of lights years away."
Sure, using your little yardstick.
Fortunately there are other tools which work better at longer distances.
unlerner: "And, yes, there are some creative and clever techniques to increase precision, but keep in mind that the claim of seeing starlight from billions of light years away has been made long before such techniques were invented."
Not that I know of, but let's consider something closer, the Andromeda galaxy:
- In 1785 William Hershel guessed at the distance to Andromeda as 2,000 times the distance to Sirius.
That would make it 180,000 light-years, short by a factor of 100.
- In 1917, Huber Curtis estimated the distance at 500,000 light-years based on the relative brightness of observed novae in Andromeda.
He was only short by a factor of 5.
- In 1922, Ernst Opik estimated 1.5 million light years based on the velocities of Andromeda stars.
He was still short by a million light years.
- In 1925, Edwin Hubble settled the debate at 2.5 million light years, based on the brightness of Cepheid variable stars.
Hubble's calculation remains the accepted distance today.
My point is: over time new methods were found to calculate distances, each being effective under its own circumstances, but not necessarily others.
unlerner: "Same applies to strata dating. “Jurassic era strata” is dated with these incredibly huge numbers that have no basis in reality.
You simply cannot use radiometric dating to determine this because there is no absolute point or frame of reference."
Nonsense.
First of all, there are dozens of different methods for dating ancient materials, some of which involve radiometrics, others don't.
Some are as relatively simple as counting tree rings, or ice cores, or layers of minerals deposited on stalactites in caves.
Others are more complex, but when multiple methods are available for the same materials, and those methods produce similar results, then confidence increases.
unlerner: "Radiometric dating does not even accurately measure rocks that have recently formed with known ages. "
Only if the radiometric dating labs are provided with false or incomplete data about the materials to be dated.
"A young-Earth research group reported that they sent a rock erupted in 1980 from Mount Saint Helens volcano to a dating lab and got back a potassium-argon age of several million years.
This shows we should not trust radiometric dating."
No it only shows that science can be tricked by dishonest people.
unlerner: "In other words, even if we have a high degree of precision for measuring radioactive decay, it can not be used to accurately date the so-called Jurassic era strata."
Pure nonsense, especially when dozens of different methods are used to reconfirm datings of many geological strata.
When the same results come back time & again, confidence increases.
unlerner: "More specifically, we can measure mass, volume, pressure, force, weight, and composition by DIRECT observation.
But age can not be measured this way except for things that are very, very young."
But age can be measured directly by such things as tree rings, ice cores and mineral deposits in caves.
And when these direct measurements match up nicely with radiometric datings of similar materials, then confidence increases.
unlerner: "TToE can not explain abiogenesis OR the existence of the mind. "
Darwin's basic theory of evolution had nothing whatever to do with either abiogenesis or existence of mind.
So why are you rambling on incoherently?
unlerner: "It is highly offensive that TToE advocates constantly slander creationists over the a priori assumption of a supernatural Creator..."
Evolution theory says nothing about your a priori assumptions.
People who do slander religion generally are usually atheists pursuing political or social agendas, and whose knowledge of science is often woefully lacking.
unlerner: "they religiously affirm the validity of a theory that hinges on these two unsupported pillars: 1) abiogenesis and 2) mind being supposedly an emergent property of matter."
Again, nothing in Darwin's basic evolution theory says anything about either of those so I repeat: why are you rambling incoherently?
unlerner: " a young universe may contain an immense amount of time.
This is not playing semantic games."
Of course it is. Get a grip, focus, make your point.
unlerner: "In the evolution vs. creation debate, TToE has morphed from evolutionary theory to theory of everything.
It’s ridiculous."
What's ridiculous is your claim that "evolutionary theory" "morphed" to "theory of everything".
What are you drinking?
What are you smoking?
Get rid of it right now!
unlerner: "Everything either “supports” the theory or nudges it slightly in a different direction.
That’s not falsifiability, “modern horses” in the Jurassic notwithstanding."
What's falsifiable is just what I said in the beginning: you will not find any kind of horse fossils from the Jurassic era, about 175 million years ago.
Indeed, the first pre-horse-like fossils do not appear until millions of years after dinosaurs disappeared 65 million years ago.
If you care to consider further, I took the time to expound a bit more on my views. This is not my field of expertise, but we all have our opinions, right? It’s a bit longer than even I (the windbag) usually post, so I understand if it is more than you care to explore. I didn’t start off to write a tome this evening, but it kind of snowballed. In fact, I’ve got some time constraints that require me to limit my further contributions to this subject over the next several days. But if you have any other comments I will read them even if I do not have time to give you a thorough response.
“likely copied & pasted from previous efforts”
Nope. Just took a few minutes to jot down some random thoughts on the subject. And I don’t keep any such resources for the purpose for debate. And I don’t plagiarize; I cite.
“And one of the biggest miracles, imho, is that the Universe was created in such a manner that we, feeble minded as we are, can understand many, if not all, of its natural processes.”
And more specifically the miracles of thought, mind, and self-awareness—the very idea of being able to learn. Not only does the Universe operate in an ordered way, we have a built-in desire and ability to learn by observation. The moon, for example, was clearly designed to perfectly align with the sun during an eclipse to appear as the same relative size. Not bigger. Not smaller. The result is that we are able to perform interesting experiments to learn about the nature of how gravity affects light and space. Even the fact that we have an atmosphere that allows the observation into the heavens is itself part of a design meant to facilitate learning. And of course life itself being preserved is part of those things necessary to learn.
But where does MIND originate? It has, until recently, merely been assumed to be an emergent property of the matter of the brain. But new scientific theories show that matter itself may be an emergent property of mind, or more properly conscious agents. (In other words, matter does not depend on OUR perception of it, but of the perception of some conscious agents which behave similarly in property to all intelligences.)
“If we were talking about dollars in your bank account, you’d be less cavalier about the differences in such numbers.”
It is not me who is being cavalier. I am pointing out that these things are being invoked in a casual, nonchalant way (i.e. cavalier) as if we really comprehended what billions of years, or even millions, look like. We don’t and we can’t. Not literally. Only in an abstract manner.
This is why I compare the invocation of millions and billions of years to invoking God. A human can learn to describe the nature of numbers that large, but we can not truly comprehend them experientially. We may live to be billions of seconds old (in our 63rd year of life when we reach 2 billion, and 3 billion only applies to centenarians, if my quick use of maths serves me), but we do not know what this means by direct experience.
So, no, I am denouncing the cavalier treatment of such large numbers. Treat them, rather, like high power electrical current. Useful. Dangerous.
“It would be like trying to measure the distance from New York to LA with a yardstick.”
A yardstick might have some success with enough effort. It is more like trying to measure color saturation in numbers of hamsters. The degree of precision is so bad that it renders all of the data completely meaningless. Horoscopes would be better sources of guidance because they could be accidentally right more often.
“[Triangulation is] the wrong tool for such large distances... Fortunately there are other tools which work better at longer distances.”
From https://lco.global/spacebook/parallax-and-distance-measurement/:
“Limitations of Distance Measurement Using Stellar Parallax
Parallax angles of less than 0.01 arcsec are very difficult to measure from Earth because of the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere. This limits Earth based telescopes to measuring the distances to stars about 1/0.01 or 100 parsecs away. Space based telescopes can get accuracy to 0.001, which has increased the number of stars whose distance could be measured with this method. However, most stars even in our own galaxy are much further away than 1000 parsecs, since the Milky Way is about 30,000 parsecs across. The next section describes how astronomers measure distances to more distant objects.”
Methods other than parallax (triangulation) are less precise and also rely on the data from parallax. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume there are bodies whose distance from us can be reliably measured as billions of light years away. This is a measure of distance rather than absolute time.
“let’s consider something closer, the Andromeda galaxy: In 1785 William Hershel guessed at the distance to Andromeda as 2,000 times the distance to Sirius.”
You will also need to multiply your degree of precision.
“Hubble’s calculation remains the accepted distance today.”
As compared to what? Yes, I know you’ve shown how science has attempted a guess at these distances to achieve what is thought to be greater precision. But we can not really verify this. We can not get in our car and drive to Andromeda and check our mileage (after adjusting for proper tire pressure) can we?
I’m just going to ask you to take a step back for a moment. It is very important that we know what we mean when we describe “time”. Time has units of measure. For example, we can measure years by the position of earth relative to the sun. Billions of years using this mechanism would mean the earth “literally” (you’ll see later why I use quotes for literal things) traversed the path around the sun for billions of repetitions. Today we might want to use an atomic clock the measure time.
When dealing with vast amounts of time, we are actually dealing with spacetime. It is not time in the conventional, ordinary sense we think of it like what time I’m going to eat dinner. Not at all. Time is relative. And time has a similar relationship with space as does energy with matter. They can be converted from one to the other in certain relativistic comparisons.
In context, how do we define the “age of the universe”? If we assume that the universe and time began from a single point (big bang) and expanded (it appears to still be expanding and actually accelerating), then different objects or particles have traveled different distances in space for different amounts of time. Remember, velocity, acceleration, and gravity all affect the comparative rate of time. Things occurring simultaneously is only a real phenomenon within an absolute frame of reference.
With this in mind, the age of the universe is the smallest amount of spacetime that exists along the rectilinear path of any object or particle since this “big bang”. I say spacetime rather than merely time because objects that are further from this point of origin have traveled at greater average velocities and have thus experienced less time elapsing.
For this reason, if we only consider the time component without the space, the universe might only be one second old (with a frame of reference to a particular particle), because there may be particles that have traveled at near light speed since their inception.
So I would describe an apparent age of the universe being “billions of years” old as meaning more literally and practically that our vast universe contains billions of years.
That being said, I do not believe for one second that our earth has traveled around the sun, literally, billions of times. Only a few thousand. The earth runs the gauntlet as it flies around the sun. If you or I were running from an armed gunman shooting at us with an assault rifle (and not shooting back), there are some reasonable odds for us to escape. If, however, there is an army of people surrounding and shooting at us like we are fish in a barrel, sooner or later we will take a fatal impact. The earth is going to have near misses every once in a while from colliding with other celestial objects that will shatter it to pieces. Except through divine intervention, such collisions are certain to happen during such immense time spans.
Consider our first known interstellar visitor sighted last year: Oumuamua. What are the odds for such an event to occur in our lifetimes? Considering how vast empty space is, how can we possibly be encountering this? How many significantly larger (i.e. earth-killer-size) objects have travelled through our solar system in the past century? Millennium? The odds of this event should be so tiny that we never see them in a multitude of lifetimes, if the earth has survived billions of trips around the sun.
“First of all, there are dozens of different methods for dating ancient materials, some of which involve radiometrics, others don’t.
Some are as relatively simple as counting tree rings, or ice cores, or layers of minerals deposited on stalactites in caves.”
Counting tree rings can only provide ages in the centuries at best, with any degree of precision worth considering. Same for ice cores, except less precise even for smaller amounts of time. The earth’s axis has not even been tilted for more than about five thousand years. Seasons as we now know them did not exist prior to that. We do not have a historical record of weather patterns to compare for a frame of reference. Cataclysms blow these concepts completely out of the water. And anyone who believes the earth has travelled around the sun for even millions of trips would be completely insane to deny that this would necessitate a practically limitless supply of data-destroying cataclysms.
“Pure nonsense, especially when dozens of different methods are used to reconfirm datings of many geological strata. When the same results come back time & again, confidence increases.”
Self-referential “methods” do not reconfirm what was never confirmed. Confidence is a bad thing when combined with mind-staggering incompetence.
“Darwin’s basic theory of evolution had nothing whatever to do with either abiogenesis or existence of mind.”
You might be a good candidate for Steve Martin’s method to riches: he says, “First, take a million dollars...”
We know through divine revelation that the variety of life on this planet came about from a divine creation during which a variety was created from the beginning. Natural selection is useful and observable just as artificial selection is useful and observable. Claims that common morphologies, etc. support ALL life, or even MOST life having a common ancestor contradicts the factual record provided by the eye-witness account of the most honest witness of history: God Himself.
But it is silly and pretentious to pretend that the origin of life (or matter for that matter) is unimportant to the study of the origin of species.
It is likewise a fundamentally flawed approach to not take into account the glaring absence of any scientific explanation for the existence of the mind. As I’ve already pointed out, mind is NOT an emergent property of matter. Matter is an emergent property of mind.
This is an incredibly hard concept for most people to wrap their brains around. Everything we know experientially about the natural world comes through our interface with the world using our five senses and the reasoning abilities of our minds.
But science supports that the persistence of objects, for example, is a mental construct. We learn somewhere in early childhood that we can return to a toy or pacifier or something, and it is still there. But in reality, the material universe we experience is a construct of the mind. It is not “literally” there. It is an interface our own mind constructs to explain properties of the reality of our personal experience.
Some people react to this viscerally because it goes against the grain of a natural inclinations toward what we perceive as “real”. As I said before, there are now two similar theories that are scientifically rigorous, testable, and falsifiable: biocentrism and conscious realism.
“No it only shows that science can be tricked by dishonest people.”
Or honest but misguided people with a religious fervor and devotion to the truth. In case it is not clear, I’m not talking about Christians or creationists. I’m talking about evolutionists with a religious devotion to their views. Yes, evolution advocates as well as Christians both care about the truth and are devoted to it. But, if the methodology is wrong, the outcome is still error, regardless of intent or the ethical behavior.
“Evolution theory says nothing about your a priori assumptions.”
Starts with the assumption that the divine record is false or at least irrelevant. If we were going to do an autopsy of Abraham Lincoln to revisit his assassination, we would NOT consult science to ascertain the historicity and factuality of Abraham Lincoln. His existence and assassination are historical facts, not scientific ones. We can not recreate his existence in the lab (cloning notwithstanding). Science would merely be called upon to support the historical record and attempt to determine if scientific inquiry could add any useful information.
In other words, science does not operate in a vacuum. This is why the distinction between operational science and historical applications of science are real. And it is why we can never seem to settle the evolution debate because we can’t take its claims into a lab and settle them once and for all. I wish it were that easy. And I would be happy to abandon my misgivings with the bad parts of TToE if they could be confirmed in this manner.
“What’s ridiculous is your claim that ‘evolutionary theory’ ‘morphed’ to ‘theory of everything’.”
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/evolit/s05/web1/amnuskin.html
From the article: “The world of quantum mechanics is very much like the randomness of natural selection that drives evolution. These tiny and random particles that exist in a world of chance do make up the well ordered world of stars, planets and galaxies; just as the random fluctuations of natural selection make up the order of evolved species.”
Evolution advocates also attempt to use the explanatory power of their pet theory to provide reasons why religious belief exists. Of course these do not include that a tendency to an awareness of the spiritual and supernatural is innate, built-in, and by design. Nor does it allow for the possibility that real people have had first-hand, eye-witness accounts of God showing up. He has intervened in history. He has spoken to people. In fact, I personally have had Him speak to me more than once and revealed information that was absolutely impossible for me to have remotely guessed. So, while I can forgive the skeptics who have NOT experienced this, it would be unreasonable for the skeptics to expect me to abandon the reality of the things I have seen and heard.
By the way, this means that empirical evidence of the divine exists. The resurrection of Christ was verified by hundreds of eye witnesses. This event, along with hundreds of others, was prophesied centuries before it occurred, along with a detailed description of His crucifixion before crucifixion was invented. Christ’s birth and death were both marked by heavenly signs. Eye-witness testimony records that the sun was eclipsed for hours during Christ’s crucifixion. This cannot be a lunar eclipse, which only lasts for a few minutes. There must have been some other object that came between the earth and the sun that day. And based on the tendency of heavenly bodies to follow elliptical trajectories, it is likely this object will return and become a threat in the future. There are several prophecies about the end of the world that indicate this will happen and force the entire population of earth to seek underground shelter. It is part of God’s plan.
“What’s falsifiable is just what I said in the beginning: you will not find any kind of horse fossils from the Jurassic era, about 175 million years ago.”
There was no such era. Endless extrapolations of extrapolations. Should we find blood and soft tissue remains preserved from Cretaceous strata? Should we find C-14 in these remains? The half-life of C-14 is 5730 years. After even one million years, not a single atom would remain. We do not even need to explore tens or hundreds of millions. The layers of strata do not represent eras. They represent sudden massive changes to the earth’s geological features during the creation and the global flood.
A global flood has far more explanatory power than the speculations of eras of eons. It was the global flood that preserved many fossils from that time period. The flood explains the stratification with layers that are frequently parallel, highly pure, and filled with large numbers of intact specimen. Gradual accumulation over vast time periods does not explain these attributes.