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To: DManA
From His perspective it took 7 days. From our perspective it was 4.6 billion years.

Only if our understanding of radiometric dating is correct. Since we have no observation for anything more than a couple of hundred years, they are all speculation and based upon incomplete data. In other words, they are guessing. The law of entropy states that an isolated system in a given state will get to a more probable state, until it reaches thermodynamic equilibrium. Basically saying warm stuff gets cold. 4.6 billion years would have expired all thermodynamic energy and our planet would have been long dead some time ago.

God did indeed create time, but He also gave us an understanding of that creation, how to measure it and how to define it. When God says He did something in a day and uses the same word to describe a 24-hour period, then I take Him at His word. There are those in the faith that subscribe to a young Earth theory but I do not as the 6,000 year attestation came from an account where the analyst could only account for 6,000 years. That does not mean we do not have a longer history, but I certainly do not subscribe to a 4.6 billion year old Earth either.

88 posted on 10/03/2011 7:57:07 AM PDT by rjsimmon (1-20-2013 The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
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To: rjsimmon
Radiometric dating, a potato peeling analogy, with credit to Geology PhD Dr John Morris:

Let’s say you were listening to a boring lecture. Your mind wanders and you see a person sitting beside the speaker peeling potatoes. You watch the man and notice that every time the second hand of the clock reaches 12, he reaches into the basket and peels a potato. Just before it reaches 12 again, he tosses a fully peeled potato in a second basket and then reaches in the basket of unpeeled potatoes and gets another one… just as the second hand reaches 12 again. You have observed the process and timed it. So far, so good. That’s science!

You wonder… how long has he been doing this? You get up (everyone else is so bored by the lecture they’ve fallen asleep so you feel free to move around) and go to the basket of peeled potatoes. You count 18 of them. You build a model of the unobserved past and say, “It takes one minute to peel a potato and deposit it in the basket. There are 18 in the basket. Therefore, this man has been peeling potatoes for eighteen minutes.” Most people would nod their heads and say “That makes sense.” Except… it doesn’t.

Too many assumptions were made in this example. You might be correct, but you might be way off. Was the rate of potato peeling constant throughout the unobserved history of this event? You have no way of knowing. It could be that the man peeled potatoes much faster at first but has now slowed down because he is tiring. It could be that he was much slower at first but is speeding up because he is getting better at it. You simply have no way of knowing. For you quantum buffs, you also have to assume that time progresses in a strictly linear fashion and — you know who you are — that just can’t be assumed!

Also… did anyone or anything add peeled potatoes to the basket? Did anyone or anything take away peeled potatoes from that basket? You don’t know. You weren’t there and neither was any other observer other than the potato-peeler himself and he isn’t talking. Were there peeled potatoes in the basket before the peeler got there?

And those are the very same (possibly) false assumptions used by those who use radiometric dating. They assume a constancy in the rate, an isolation from the environment that might have caused a change in the rate, and they assume what the original state of the rock was. All three of these are assumptions made without observation or measurement. They are, then, not strictly science.


90 posted on 10/03/2011 8:04:55 AM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter knows whom he's working for)
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