Evidence for a young Earth

[Omega Red]

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I did not even dignify his nonsense with a reply.

First of all, I had never heard of anyone arriving at an age of 100-160 years.
But maybe someone did (???). If so, they are w-r-o-n-g... period!

The numbers I had heard placed an UPPER LIMIT at tens of millions of years.
Of course, an upper limit does not mean that this is the age, it just means
that it cannot be any older than this. While this does not prove thousands
of years, it does demolish their beloved billions of years.

Jorge

Yet, as I posted before in a thread you are appearing to avoid now (understandably so), Russell Humphreys' WHC model would have allowed for billions of years and not just millions. So go figure. Who is pushing the most consistent argument for pro-YEC? What does it actually look like? Functional design testing to longer periods than 6kyrs with almost no scientific evidence for 6kyrs or less? No-one seems to have their story straight so far.

[Jorge]

Yet, as I posted before in a thread you are appearing to avoid now (understandably so), Russell Humphreys' WHC model would have allowed for billions of years and not just millions. So go figure. Who is pushing the most consistent argument for pro-YEC? What does it actually look like? Functional design testing to longer periods than 6kyrs with almost no scientific evidence for 6kyrs or less? No-one seems to have their story straight so far.

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Humphreys is a Biblical Creationist - thousands, not millions or billions.

Methinks you got something all mixed up or perhaps an incomplete
and/or distorted version of his views. Try again.

Jorge

[phank]

In fact, the point you raise actually raises a broader criticism: YEC attempts to show the viability of their interpretation of scripture tend to be arguments of convenience. They have little to do with constructing a viable, consistent theory or set of inter-related theories that explains all the evidence around them.

This important point is almost invariably lost in the noise of trying to debunk one particular bogus claim after another. The YEC approach is to say: "Here is a detail that, properly misconstrued, can be interpreted favorably. And THERE is another detail which, properly misconstrued, can also be interpreted favorably. And there's another over there, and another over here." But each detail must be misconstrued in different ways, by constructing mutually exclusive assumptions necessary to misconstrue or misrepresent. There simply IS no overarching theory, no sign that YECs have the slightest sense of the importance of consiliance. I've seen quite a few people asking YEC folks, "well, the assumption you made to rationalize X is incompatible with the assumption you made to rationalize Y. So which assumption are you going to go with?" I've never seen such questions answered with anything more than insults (or simply vanishing, or changing the subject).

I hyupothesize that this is the natural result of a demon-haunted world. Demons are whimsical, inconsistent, and unpredictable. They do not NEED to be coherent. The YEC god has all kinds of different magic up his sleeve, and pulls out whatever he needs to create false impressions that evilutionists always fall for.

[Omega Red]

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Humphreys is a Biblical Creationist - thousands, not millions or billions.

Methinks you got something all mixed up or perhaps an incomplete
and/or distorted version of his views. Try again.

Jorge

You just cannot help yourself it seems. Try reading his book Jorge, it wasn't great and ultimately incorrect, but at least you'll see what he was trying to do. Billions of years would be allowable under his WHC model for distant starlight, relatively speaking. Billions of years would be testable and therefore be an allowable upper limit.

Anyway, as I said, where is the consistent pro-YEC model with claims of scientific evidence being greater than 6kyrs, almost nothing for less than 6kyrs and having to rely on YEC interpretation of scripture? The mind boggles as to why you don't see these massive problems. Which bits of functionally designed and do lake varves fall into that category? You ever going to produce the post you claim to exist where you presented and discussed the data?

[rogue06]

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I did not even dignify his nonsense with a reply.

First of all, I had never heard of anyone arriving at an age of 100-160 years.
But maybe someone did (???). If so, they are w-r-o-n-g... period!

The numbers I had heard placed an UPPER LIMIT at tens of millions of years.
Of course, an upper limit does not mean that this is the age, it just means
that it cannot be any older than this. While this does not prove thousands
of years, it does demolish their beloved billions of years.

Jorge

Oh you're familiar with it because you have advanced the salinity of the oceans argument before. As I recently told you less than a month ago (which isn't the time you brought it up though)...

There are several glaring problems with this that have absolutely nothing to do with "ideological commitments"

First, at best it demonstrates that a specific feature on the Earth, the seas, aren’t very old, rather than the Earth itself.

Second, this claim is based on the incredibly naïve assumption that the ocean is an eternal reservoir, and when the salt is dumped in the ocean it isn’t being removed from the oceans since it stays there permanently. This assumption is false as it has been demonstrated that elements of the ocean are being constantly recycled and leave the water.

For instance, plate tectonics shapes our planet causing sea beds rise and evaporate and leaving large salt deposits.

And it should be noted that Austin and Humphreys (from who this canard arose) greatly underestimate the amount of sodium lost in the alteration of basalt, something Glenn Morton (who posts here as grmorton) tried to warn them about but was unsurprisingly ignored.

On the flip side the claim assumes that the rate at which rivers deposit materials into the oceans is a constant. In fact, there is every reason to believe that it would not be constant. There is no uniform rate of accumulation of salt.

Third, this claim is based upon research published in Chemical Oceanography in 1965 that essentially was a list of several minerals’ "residency times" in the ocean, or the average time that a small amount of an element stays in the sea water before being removed. It needs to be emphasized that they aren’t the times that it takes for the element to accumulate as so many YECs maintain.

And more importantly YECs who quote from this research always carefully cherry-pick their dates since if these numbers provide an upper age date then according to this logic it took only 100 years for the oceans to obtain the present level of aluminum, 140 years for iron and just 160 years for titanium.

Obviously the oceans are a great deal older than a century or two, and just as obviously one can understand why the YECs ignore these calculations from the source they cite.

As I noted these objections have nothing to do "ideological commitments" but rather expose this argument to be incredibly weak at best.

[phank]

And more importantly YECs who quote from this research always carefully cherry-pick their dates since if these numbers provide an upper age date then according to this logic it took only 100 years for the oceans to obtain the present level of aluminum, 140 years for iron and just 160 years for titanium.

Obviously the oceans are a great deal older than a century or two, and just as obviously one can understand why the YECs ignore these calculations from the source they cite.

As I noted these objections have nothing to do "ideological commitments" but rather expose this argument to be incredibly weak at best.

But I think you might agree that the salinity argument itself is presented for ideological reasons, and the cherry-picking about aluminum etc. is done for ideological reasons, and the very carefully repeated misunderstanding about upper limits for the ocean not being upper limits for the planet are done for ideological reasons, and the assumptions about constant inflow with no outflow are made for ideological reasons, and residency times are conflated with accumulation times for ideological reasons, and the relatioship between sodium and basalt is ignored for ideological reasons, and the beat goes on...

The very obvious, multiple and glaring problems are not themselves ideological. But what they are glaring problems WITH, as usual, is pure ideology.

[Jorge]

Oh you're familiar with it because you have advanced the salinity of the oceans argument before.

Yes, I am familiar with it and I distinctly wrote that the numbers that
I had seen placed an upper limit in the tens of millions of years.

I can go sloooooooooooower if you like.

Return to your Reading Classes for Dummies.

Jorge

[Tiggy]

JORGE WATCH

1582 posts and still no evidence of a young Earth from Jorge.

- T

[rogue06]

Yes, I am familiar with it and I distinctly wrote that the numbers that
I had seen placed an upper limit in the tens of millions of years.

I can go sloooooooooooower if you like.

Return to your Reading Classes for Dummies.

Jorge

The point that sails so far over your head is that using the very same method it took only 100 years for the oceans to obtain the present level of aluminum. IOW, according to YECs such as yourself my grandparents were all born before there was an ocean. Are you starting to see how faulty this method you selected is?

[oxmixmudd]

The point that sails so far over your head is that using the very same method it took only 100 years for the oceans to obtain the present level of aluminum. IOW, according to YECs such as yourself my grandparents were all born before there was an ocean. Are you starting to see how faulty this method you selected is?

We all know the answer to that rogue06. Since Jorge won't admit it, I'll make it explicit. This method (either form) does not in fact put any kind of upper limit on the age of the because the ocean is not a closed system. There inputs, and there are outputs. To top that off, the system itself is not static. Thus, this kind of simplistic analysis of salinity (or 'aluminity') can tell us very little if anything at all about how old the oceans (or the planet) actually are.

There are, however, other systems, other processes, which can tell us fairly accurately how old the rocks are. Scientists use those methods.


Jim

[phank]

Argument a la Jorge:

1) Cherry pick chemicals and elements that happen to fit the desired time frame
2) Ignore all others
3) Insult anyone who mentions any others
4) When challenged, start a new thread on some other topic.

[rogue06]

After a bit of searching I found one of the other arguments that Jorge has put forth in support of a young earth:

The circa 6,000 year figure comes from Scripture and you probably already knew that. One of the supporting evidence for this is the fact that no human document exists that can be incontrovertibly dated to before around 4,000 BC. Do you know of any such document?

That of course doesn’t speak to the age of creation but rather the start of writing which is hardly the same thing. The Incas never developed writing yet they developed a complex civilization and culture that existed until only a few hundred years ago. And by demanding that the writing be shown to be “inconvertibly” from before 4000B.C. he has created a Catch-22 in that since YECs such as Jorge don’t think the planet existed much before this time anything dated prior to that would not be “inconvertible” in their eyes. IOW, he has established a No-win situation that will automatically disallow any evidence that contradicts his belief.

[Tiggy]

After a bit of searching I found one of the other arguments that Jorge has put forth in support of a young earth:

The circa 6,000 year figure comes from Scripture and you probably already knew that. One of the supporting evidence for this is the fact that no human document exists that can be incontrovertibly dated to before around 4,000 BC. Do you know of any such document?

That of course doesn’t speak to the age of creation but rather the start of writing which is hardly the same thing. The Incas never developed writing yet they developed a complex civilization and culture that existed until only a few hundred years ago. And by demanding that the writing be shown to be “inconvertibly” from before 4000B.C. he has created a Catch-22 in that since YECs such as Jorge don’t think the planet existed much before this time anything dated prior to that would not be “inconvertible” in their eyes. IOW, he has established a No-win situation that will automatically disallow any evidence that contradicts his belief.

I'll add to this there are plenty of human produced artifacts that can be incontrovertibly dated to well before 4,000 BC. We've got clothing, jewelry, even musical instruments that date to over 10K years ago, pottery that dates to over 20K years ago. The cave paintings at Lascaux date to over 37K years ago.

Jorge's argument is a stupid as saying "we don't have any airplanes that date before 1900, so the Earth is at most only 112 years old!

- T

[USIncognito]

Oooops. Humpreys "prediction" doesn't hold up as well as one might expect.
http://eyeonicr.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/mercury-iii/

Anyway, his little model predicted that the decline in Mercury’s magnetic field between then and now would have been four percent. Mr Thomas is claiming that this ‘fits’ the recorded measurements, which gave an approximately twenty-seven percent decline over the same period. The criteria for accurate predictions in the creationist world is apparently rather low.

"This confirms that Mercury’s magnetic field is rapidly diminishing, which in turn confirms that the field must only be thousands of years old—just as the creation model predicts."

Actually, no – rather, it tells us that this simplistic modelling of the earth’s field over such a time is, well, simplistic. You can’t draw conclusions directly from it about the age of anything. Indeed, if the predicted drop is nearly seven times smaller than the observation, wouldn’t that move the date for creation closer to now?

That's right folks. Humpreys prediction and the observation means Mercury and therefore the whole Universe is only ~860 years old.

Why is Dr.* ignoring this post? Why won't he respond to it? I see poop and feathers from the last few days, but no reponse.

[phank]

Nice that Humphries had the semblance of a theoretical model, from which he was able to derive a prediction however silly it may have been considering what is known about Earth's magnetic field. The nice thing about Humphrey's predictions is, observation can either support it or refute it. Turns out observation refutes it pretty solidly. And now we see the REAL difference between science and creationism -- Humphreys turns around and LABELS the refuting data as being "support", and the model he used isn't even tweaked.

Hypothetically, imagine if the next Mercury trip showed the magnetic field reversed and increasing rapidly. Would Humphries then concede that his model is not useful, or would he instead ignore previous findings, extrapolate the increasing magnetic field back in time to zero field, and "discover" THAT to be the age of the universe? When you know the answers a priori, evidence is whatever misrepresentation can be made to fit them. If no amount of distortion is sufficient, then it's not evidence. How can it be?