Posted on 03/18/2009 7:31:56 AM PDT by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Canada's science minister, the man at the centre of the controversy over federal funding cuts to researchers, won't say if he believes in evolution.
“I'm not going to answer that question. I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate,” Gary Goodyear, the federal Minister of State for Science and Technology, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
A funding crunch, exacerbated by cuts in the January budget, has left many senior researchers across the county scrambling to find the money to continue their experiments.
Some have expressed concern that Mr. Goodyear, a chiropractor from Cambridge, Ont., is suspicious of science, perhaps because he is a creationist.
When asked about those rumours, Mr. Goodyear said such conversations are not worth having.
Brian Alters, founder and director of the Evolution Education Research Centre at McGill University in Montreal, was shocked by the minister's comments
“It is the same as asking the gentleman, ‘Do you believe the world is flat?' and he doesn't answer on religious grounds,” said Dr. Alters. “Or gravity, or plate tectonics, or that the Earth goes around the sun.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Not so. No one KNOWS about dog evolution. Was it 10,000 years ago, or 150,000 years (as some say now)? But I can see how dogs interact, what works and doesn’t work - I can KNOW their behavior in the present. Making guesses about how something might have evolved, or how it might increase survivability in the future - those are distractions.
Anatomy - do I need a knowledge of car evolution to work on my car? Nope. Just need to know how MY car works in the present. A knowledge of carburetors won’t help me fix fuel injectors.
Evolution is more akin to history than science. That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth studying...but you don’t need evolution to understand biology.
Correct!
Please re-read my explanation. For C-14 dating to work at all, exchange of carbon with the outside environment in a given sample (such as a chunk of wood) has to stop. That's what happens when an organic sample is dead and buried. So long as carbon exchange is occuring then the 'clock' for dating hasn't started, and the sample can't be correctly dated.
C-14 is produced by cosmic rays impacting N-14 in the upper atmosphere. It is not being produced underground*. So buried samples that have measurable C-14 must have been buried within a thousands-of-years timeframe (as measured by the C-14 remaining), not millions.
*(When this began to become public, some people suggested C-14 could be produced in situ in the geologic record due to uranium decay, but it was investigated and found to be an unworkable solution because the method only produced infinitisemal amounts of C-14. The sample would have to be over 90% uranium to produce the measured amounts of C-14, and as one scientist drily noted, "You wouldn't ordinarily call such a sample 'coal.'")
Wow, the anti-God crowd are now hunting down their own heritcs, the very reason they often claim to hate the pro-God crowd.
At least, my assertions are supported by the evidence, rather than “groupie-ism.”
That will date the sample in question. To use that as evidence of a young earth, you have to assume that nothing else can be any older than that sample.
Well, we could say that of any method/sample. The salient point here is that coal and other C-14 dated samples (dinosaur tissue has also been C-14 'dated') are conventionally said to be hundreds of millions of years old using the same dating techniques that are used to justify the 4.56 BYA age for the earth. If those techniques are wrong in the case of coal, diamonds, dinosaurs, etc., then we have no justification for believing it accurate for the age of the earth.
We've already known for some time that (1) when rocks of known age are dated with methods like Ar/Ar and U/Pb they incorrectly give very large ages, (2) radioisotope decay can be accelerated a billion-fold or more in the lab under appropriate conditions, and (3) different methods typically do not agree with one another on the same sample (despite the occasional concordance that is emphasized in pro-evolutionary literature, it has been clear for some time that this is not generally the case.)
There is good evidence from helium retention in zircons and other phenomena that there has been a recent burst of inorganic radioisotope decay within the past few thousand years that would largely explain the old 'dates' found using these techniques. (Cf. http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/nab/does-radiometric-dating-prove) This would also explain the absence of most short-life isotopes, which has been used as an argument against a young earth.
Thus, on the whole I came to regard inorganic radiometric dating as a very weak argument a long time ago, much less robust than generally regarded and less so than many other chronometers such as the C-14 evidence, magnetic field decay, and salt and other mineral influx into oceans.
Esitmates of the age of the Earth aren't based on C-14 dating. We're back where we started.
I've read that analysis. It was a limited sample, and the analysis failed to take a number of variables into account. Your criteria for what constitutes "good" evidence seem highly questionable.
Indeed. When you do that with Uranium, we call it a "bomb". If that's what happened to all the uranium, the planet would have been vaporized.
We've invited, asked and cajoled evolutionists to repeat the experiments and publish the results themselves. I encourage you to do so or ask others in the right line of work to do so.
How many times has the experiment been repeated, and with consistent results by the original researchers, or other young earth proponents?
Do you have figures or a reference handy? It would help to understand the amount of uranium in the earth and the amount of heat, etc. released by accelerated decay. This would help generate boundary conditions for any modeling of accelerated decay.
I would note in passing that at least one creation model includes an expansion of space (similar to that involved in 'big bang' models) at the time of the Kataklusmos, that would have the effect of cooling off matter within the expanded space. I regard this as extremely speculative, but it may be an answer to this objection.
Apparently not enough. But it's never enough for some people. ;-)
Was it ever repeated?
II Peter 3 makes it clear that scoffers would build their anti-biblical case for an old earth based on a denial of the Kataklusmos. It's sad that some Christians blindly follow in their footsteps and refuse to rely on the Bible as the foundation for all wisdom and knowledge. You'd think the collapse of their 'mainstream' churches and cultures (such as in western Europe where their apostasy is more prevalent) would clue them in that something is wrong.
The heat issue was the point in question. If we're in agreement on that, the rest is posturing.
Again, that’s fine if you’re content with biology just being a collection of random facts that might be immediately useful but have no logical framework or underpinning. Understanding evolution means that these facts make sense in a broad context. This might not help you train a dog but there’s more to science than just what is immediately useful. After all, relativity was merely a mathematical construct in the early 20th century but today knowledge of relativity is essential in numerous, practical ways. I suspect that our understanding of evolution, particularly at the molecular level, will reap numerous practical benefits in the decades to come.
All models of earth history have open issues. If you reject a given model because of one unresolved issue then you must be an agnostic indeed on the age of the earth and all details of earth history.
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