[Christians: what are your thoughts on the age of the earth?]
Anyone who believes that this planet has survived millions of years is really brainwashed
49 comments
Meh, the ever whiny "carbon-dating doesn't work, waaa!" gang. Newsflash fundietards, we use different dating methods for different things. SCIENCE determined the limitations of carbon dating, not religion.
(Mortok)
Now, now, Mortok. You should know better than to kneel to someone who doesn't respect hard limits or safe-words.
*wolfish grin*
"All sources of dating that we have are flawed."
Ah, you're not getting laid. Have you tried a lonely hearts ad?
Whilst walking in some woods at the weekend I picked up a stone. Just an ordinary stone covered in mud. I cleaned the mud from the stone and lo and behold the stone was smooth and rounded. How has this happened I wondered? How has a stone, which looks like it came out of the sea, all weathered and eroded, just like those on the beach, ended up in a wood outside of Stoke-on-Trent in England?
Maybe God smoothed it? maybe he gathered up billions of stones and put them into a huge tumbler, then, because he's God, he wound the tumbler impossibly fast and made all these stones smooth in a matter of seconds.
Maybe Noah threw the stone over-board when he was sailing to the poles looking for Polar bears and wooly Mammoths (Obviously he was unable to find the Mammoths).
Then I got to thinking about all the oil, miles under-ground, the fossils, the gems stones, rock-strata's, cave painting etc etc etc etc etc etc etc
Twat.
"Meh, the ever whiny "carbon-dating doesn't work, waaa!" gang"
Radiocarbon isotopes have halflives of 5558 years, so they can only be used to test the ages of organic material that is no older than 60,000 years.
The ages of rocks are determined by radiological dating of the ratios between radioactive elements and their decay products, like uranium/lead. By testing the ages of meteorites, we know that the material in the solar system is 4.5 billion years old, and that includes the earth.
That Christians are too stupid or too lazy to find this out for themselves amazes me.
To 'Pastor Biker', the last (and fundiest) answerer:
Your attempts to copy and paste vast amounts of crap from (YEC) www.earthage.org would be less obvious if your 'post' did not end in mid-sentence...
The earth is no older than 6 to 10 thousand years.
The earth will be 6,011 years old next month. Repent, heretic!
"Anyone who believes that this planet has survived millions of years is really brainwashed"
If all sources of dating we have are flawed, prove that it is not even older! Please do so with actual proof and not some story told by people who thought the sun was a chariot.
The earth is no older than 6 to 10 thousand years. All sources of dating that we have are flawed.
I'd bet a dollar that the reason most Creationists believe this guff is due to the fact that they have no idea how those numbers were arrived at. Bishop Ussher added up all the years listed in the generational verses in the Bible and arrived at the figure of 6,000 years. If I remember correctly, the precise date for the creation of the Earth is sometime in October.
@ Beeblebrox:
It was a Thursday.
The creation date for the universe is October 23, my birthday. Does that make me somehow special? Probably not because creationism is a bunch of nonsense. At least I can do one thing that god can't do, I can prove that I exist.
All sources of dating that we have are flawed.
What about the supernova that was measured at 169,000 light years away? What's the flaw there? Space is warped like in Star Trek? God changes the speed of light every so often? The creationists have no legitimate answer. There's no evidence outside the Bible that the earth is only 6,000 years old. And once you show that the Bible is wrong, there's no reason to continue the argument.
All sources of dating that we have are flawed.
That includes your bullshit ones that claim it's 6,000?
@Beeblebrox
Not particularly: I reckon anyone who's quoting a range like 6000 - 10000 rather than a flat 6000 may have done a little research.
The thing is, Ussher had a choice of texts for the Old Testament. He could have used the Hebraic, the Samaritan, or the Ethiopic texts, which would have made the difference of about 4,000 years. As far as I can work out, he chose the Hebraic text because the other ones didn't agree with it, which sounds like fundie logic to me, but I could be wrong about that or at least oversimplifying.
It doesn't change the fact that the figure does rely on the Bible being literally true, but at least primoa1970 is saying only that the Bible is true, and not necessarily that Ussher chose the right text, like so many other YECs blindly believe.
That doesn't make it any less crazy, 'course.
Yes, carbon dating was proven flawed because the method they came up with ASSUMED that the ratio of C12:C13:C14 has never changed, which is incorrect, because it has. Fortunately, someone has come up with a formula to correct the problem.
Also, there are new methods of dating now that don't use carbon 14 and are more predictable and stable, such as potassium-argon dating in volcanic rocks. This method can date something back to millions of years (potassium 40 has a half-life of 1.5 million years).
Therefore, your assumption = epic fail. Yes, our planet is young. But somehow I think that if it were only a few thousand years old, we'd be standing in a puddle of magma.
But what do I know? I've clearly been brainwashed by a liberal arts university.
I wash my brain several times a day, at which time I refill it with more facts. And I don't want to embarrass you, but you r brain is starting to spread a noxious odor right through my computer screen. Seriously, I think something died between your ears. Or maybe it's just because it's stagnant.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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