Posted on 02/06/2014 1:58:22 PM PST by celmak
On many mornings, I wake up and think, “You know what this country needs? More culture war.” As I scramble up a couple eggs, I find myself wishing—fervently wishing—that we could spend more time reducing substantive issues to mere spectacle. Later, as I scrub the pan, I’ll fantasize about how those very spectacles might even funnel money toward some of the country’s most politicized religious groups.
Fortunately, Bill “the Science Guy” Nye has heard my wish—which, really, is the wish of a nation. Why else would he have traveled to Kentucky this week in order to debate Ken Ham, the young-earth creationist founder of Answers in Genesis, about the origins of the world?
Actually, there are two other reasons that Nye might have done so, and I’ve given both possibilities a great deal of thought in the past few days. The first is that Nye, for all his bow-tied charm, is at heart a publicity-hungry cynic, eager to reestablish the national reputation he once had as the host of a PBS show. When his stint on Dancing With the Stars ended quickly, Nye turned to the only other channel that could launch him back to national attention: a sensationalized debate, replete with the media buzz that he craves.
Possibility number two is that Nye is clueless—that, for all his skill as a science communicator, Nye has less political acumen than your average wombat.
After watching the debate, I’m leaning toward that second possibility. Last night, it was easy to pick out the smarter man on the stage. Oddly, it was the same man who was arguing that the earth is 6,000 years old.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Π "=" 3; 2 Chronicles 4:2
Good question! God is not without His secrets. But He has released the answers to many in His books (plural) as He has seen fit.
Yeah ... he also managed to keep secret how babies get produced in his Bible, in which a lot of begetting gets done, a point to which you curiously do not reply.
I want you to reflect on the fact that pretty much all of the "answers" that "God" provides in the Bible are in fact extrapolations and interpolations provided by you and various apologists you quote. The Bible itself doesn't answer anything very often, and when it does it's usually wrong. But you folks make a valiant effort continuing to try to patch it up.
The way you cherry pick what it says at http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/age.html is satisfyingly illustrative.
This is pretty typical of the way Crevo's approach what they think is "science:" straining a gnat to swallow a camel. Some minor detail of the Standard Model gets changed and it's "Oh! The Big Bang is Wrong! See! See!" Or, some fossil was proved to be a hoax decades ago, and as a result "the fossil record is mostly baloney."
What the USGS site says is: the EXACT age of the Earth is difficult to establish. But please keep reading, because the site you claim "proves" that the Earth is not millions of years old, actually says: Ancient rocks exceeding 3.5 billion years in age are found on all of Earth's continents and it goes on to note specific sampling sites where rocks of varying ages of 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 billion years in age may be found, and also this: The oldest rocks on Earth found so far are the Acasta Gneisses in northwestern Canada near Great Slave Lake (4.03 Ga).
So, your idea of science is: "meteorites and the moon say the Earth is 4.5 Ga, but because of plate tectonics the oldest exposed rocks we actually have are only 4 Ga. Therefore, I conclude that the Earth is 6,000 years old." Genius.
The rest of your screed is crap. You claim that Galileo was not confined to house arrest (maybe, can't tell, because you simply make some non-authoritative claim without a citation or any explanation.) Well, Galileo was a friend of the Pope's. That saved his life; how generous.
The Church clearly thought he was maligned, because inconveniently for your nonsensical claim, the Church apologized. I reproduce the quote here in full, because it is also one of mainstream Christianity's most eloquent smack-downs of your narrow minded literalism:
"Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the centre of the world, as it was then known, that is to say, as a planetary system. The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was, in some way, imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture....
—Pope John Paul II, L'Osservatore Romano N. 44 (1264) - November 4, 1992
And that, too, is the error of your understanding as well.
It's completely debunked and 100% crap. A waste of time even reading it, let alone answering it.
So you hadn’t heard about the blind radio-isotope dating from Mt. St. Helens 1980 eruption where rocks were dated to over 1 million years?
BTW what Einstein ~ Shroeder ~ Humphreys basically said about Gravitational Time Dilation regarding ralativity ~ big bang ~ creation week summarized was:
1st day ~ 7-8 billion years apparent time [due to stretching the universe
2nd day ~ half of 1st day and so on for 6 days gives:
13.7 to 15.75 billion years of apparent [not actual] elapsed time.
err relativity not ‘ral’...
So please clue us in who?, where? when? - maybe I could debate that point if there were any meat on the bone....
I can point to the number 1 scientist of all time and the number 1 book of all time.
Isaac Newton added up all the ‘begettings/begottens’ from the Bible and came up with a number less than 20 years different from Bishop Usher chronology of 4,004 BC.
Peer-reviewed is crap when they won’t allow the christians to ‘build in their sandbox, unless they agree to go along with the ‘charades’ ~ accepted paradigm of old ages.
There is plenty of common sense facts that also won’t allow for millions yet alone billions of years of actual elapsed time.
Population studies alone for all the lifeforms would bury us all under mountains of dust and crap. Neil Armstrong was afraid to land and step on the moon b/c some of the scientific conjecture at the time allowed for upto 6 - 12 feet of dust.
Have you read anything about the 4cm/year recession of the Moons’ orbit due to tidal friction? Or the Roche limit where if we reversed time to bring the Moon halfway back to the Earth the daily lunar tides would swamp the highest mountaintops?
In the article quoted, he is actually not. He mumbles a few things about special relativity ["regions of high velocity"] which are false, general relativity ["regions of high gravity"] which are true, and have no bearing, and then posits [what he claims is] an entirely new mechanism for time dilation which calls the "the stretching of space."
Parenthetically, again, let me note that Miggie doesn't seem to understand what time dilation is, because he claims Schroeder isn't talking about it, even though Scroeder very clearly says he is. Apparently one of the two words "stretching" and "dilation" aren't in his Migslinesses' vocabulary.
Now there are two things about this: 1) There is no time dilation produced by the expansion of the universe, per se, and 2) the time dilation provided by the relative velocities of distant objects needed to keep space isotropic in an expanding universe does indeed exist. And it is 100% accounted for by the Special Theory of relativity.
Now, I will not quibble that Schroeder is trying to count the same effect twice by erroneously claiming that the indirect cause of time dilation is "space stretching" instead of the real cause which is simply commotional velocity. The real problem with his physics is that it doesn't have the effect he describes. All observers in commotional reference frames see the OTHER people's clocks running more slowly. There is no preferred reference frame, and in particular, there is no reference frame AT ALL in which the clocks appear to outside observers to run faster. So Schroeder's reasoning is actually backwards. The proper time of the Earth is actually the shortest time perceivable for the Earth's reference in any other reference frame. That means there is no alternative point of view under which our proper time of 14 billion years can be perceived as 6,000 years, nor any time during which the events described as creation can be perceived as happening in six days.
I've heard about many instances of sample contamination that have had to be accounted for. But as it stands now, the error margin is about 3-4%.
So you're a Young Earth Creationist? And you honestly think that modern geology is basically a con?
BTW what Einstein ~ Shroeder ~ Humphreys basically said about Gravitational Time Dilation regarding ralativity ~ big bang ~ creation week summarized was:
You'll have to take that up with MHGinTN, who said that Schroeder wasn't talking about time dilation.
I prefer to go back to a time when science was self-funded and/or privately funded with much less bias introduced than 10,000 nobodies trying to continue making a living off the government and university grants to continue supporting secular humanism! When christians dominated the prestigoue scientific fields rather than being shunned by their peers. The paradigm has simply traded the one true faith for so many ‘man-made religions’ masquarading as science. And historical err rather hysterical science at that! Science that can never even follow the basic steps of the scientific method.
Creationism is another example of religion making really smart people believe really stupid things.
Peer-reviewed is crap when they won’t allow the christians to ‘build in their sandbox, unless they agree to go along with the ‘charades’ ~ accepted paradigm of old ages.
OK, so now you're saying that no Christian has ever written any peer-reviewed article about geology?
Please provide evidence that every peer-reviewed article about geology was written by a non-Christian. Let's get that out of the way first, then I will accept that "peer review is crap".
So you must be happy to see the Freeper anti-evolution camp completely abandon Intelligent Design and the Discovery Institute, and totally embrace Ken Ham’s 6,000 year old flood geology.
Sample contamination or conjectured and assumed contamination like so many main stream media stories. Check all your assumptions at the door and see whose mountain is bigger.
I say prove it - either you can’t or you won’t b/c you think somehow science quit making mistakes after we landed on the Moon. Global warming is highly peer reviewed and accepted by many prestigous scientific experts or so we hear.
And yet it still leaves science guessing at how the Moon originated. Sorry not buying it after all the fraud I’ve seen perpetrated on the simple folk.
How long ago did evolution have to abandon their origins from muck due to the hard science of abiogenesis. Just another item to sweep under the rug and avoid discussion. A rather big one b/c your precious evolution currently has no foundation!
Read closely again ~ peer-reviewed has become more like peer-pressured [you wanna keep your job and grant monies don’t ya?!].
Yet strangely, Archimedes did not believe in Jesus.
Now, if you'd like to bring up the objection that Archimedes was born 250 years before Christ, I won't object. But I will point out that attempting to invoke ancient authorities who did not have access to the same evidence that we have is exactly what YOU are trying to do...
No, I'm saying there's no scientific basis for a Young Earth, and it's an idea only believed by a small group of evangelicals.
There's no support in field of geology for a young earth. The only counter you have is some massive global conspiracy by every geologist on the planet to hide the truth, and that only the small cargo cult of creationists in the US and Oz know the truth.
Please provide evidence of the conspiracy that keeps Christians from writing peer-reviewed articles about geology.
You won't because you can't.
I’m also saying what the Bible says: Many make the claim to be christians but few actually have the courage of their convictions ~ well actually it is probably more than a few - rather a small percentage.
Testimonies of Scientists Who Believe the Bible
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2761001/posts
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