When discussing evolution, they argue that speciation cannot be assumed because no one has ever verified that change happened.
When discussing radiometrics they argue that decay rates cannot be assumed to be constant because no can verify that change has not happened.
You do realise that those are not contradictory. And that, in fact, science is supposed to be about verification, not assumption, and that whenever something has not been verified, it cannot be assumed.
If someone were to take either of those arguments and say they proved the negative, your complaint would have merit.
But any claim of scientific fact can be dismissed if it can be shown there is no verification of the assumptions.
The problem with applying scientific evolution to the mythology of origins is that we cannot observe initial conditions, and we cannot observe or repeat the past.
We can guess what happened in the past, and pretend that Occam’s razor is actually a scientific principle rather than a handy way of guessing at what happened, but we’ll never be able to say with certainty that a particular belief of the process of origins is the correct one.
After all, an all-powerful God could have created the universe 6000 years ago in precisely the state it would have to be in if it had evolved over billions of years. Sure, from a scientific perspective that would be “uninteresting”, but there’s no way to prove it didn’t happen.
So then, if I read this right, shouldn’t they also argue that the earth might be significantly older too - based on the idea of changing decay rates? Since we don’t know if it happened, couldn’t it have happened in either direction?
>>But what if the assumptions are wrong? For example, what if radioactive material was added to the top bowl or if the decay rate has changed?
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>When discussing radiometrics they argue that decay rates cannot be assumed to be constant because no can verify that change has not happened.
Except that the second part is another valid way to change the results. Let’s say we have maggots and flies and they behave the same way as radioactive decay, that at every so often half of the maggots will change into flies. Now if we have a set number of maggots, say 1000 in some sealed environment and come back some time later we can estimate how much time has elapsed by measuring the number of flies/maggots there are and applying what we know about exponential growth/decay curves. (There is one exception: after a while there is NO reliability in determining a maximum age, but rather a minimum age emerges; in this case I think that happens around 10 or 11 halflives.)
Now, let’s say you have an environment that is still sealed but another scientist comes in and, not realizing you’re in the middle of something, adds or removes flies or maggots? Then, when you try to apply your knowledge about exponential growth/decay you will get erroneous conclusions.
OK, tell us why they CAN be assumed to have been constant for all those millions or billions of years.
How do scientists KNOW for sure?