As it is a historical fact, with laboratory demonstrations and a well-articulated and successful predictive model based on the same chemical forces that drive all known life processes, it is irrelevant other than to your personal success whether or not you accept it.
but people have a right to their beliefs and opinions
As I argued before,
ignorant people have no natural right to opinions about facts and things that matter. The legal invention of a freedom to hold an opinion was only created to avoid government suppression of potentially good ideas, and doesn't not prevent me from publicly arguing that there are many reasons to believe your opinion is detrimental to human society.
Ignorant people have no natural right to communicate opinions and hold that they have the same weight as the opinions of those that investigate. Moreover while man necessarily operates with limited information, in the cases where opinions matter some opinions must be better than others. Science is the process of testing opinions that matter and discarding those opinions that are unworthy.
and how else are we to learn?
Having an opinion is not learning. Being newly able to correctly predict the behavior of phenomena in the universe is learning -- a type of learning we call science.
Humorous or strange?
if we were to find out the Earth and solar system has only been around for a few thousand years.
Would it be funny to find out that luck is real and people who win lottery jackpots were actually better than people who work hard in direct proportion to the amount of lottery winnings? Would it be funny to find out that Disney film
Dumbo was the most accurate documentary film possible? Would it be funny to find out mathematical truth depends on how much sex you are having at the time? In your example and all of these examples, the only thing you would be "finding out" would be that you have suffered a severe neurological event and you don't have a new way of learning so much as a novel delusion not reconcilable with objective fact.
Gee what a great idea! I think they should teach math using your idea, on MWF 2 + 2 = 4 an on TTH 2 + 2 = 0, that will surely help the kids learn.
Origin, your example would indicate delusion
Exactly the point that origin wished to convey. The idea you raised is delusion and baseless.
and the tone is not conducive to learning.
Neither are leading questions without basis in fact. When one is ignorant, one needs to ask non-leading questions -- "How old is the Earth and how do we know?" -- rather than leading questions predicated on nothing: "Is it possible the SFO crash was caused by Kryptonian terrorists?"
Let me ask you a question, why do you believe the earth is older than say 10,000 years? Do not refer me to "'cause so an so said\says so" give me something concrete and with substance, something we can really sink our teeth into.
It's completely unclear how one is supposed to imagine us "finding out" the Earth is young when we can count past 10,000 in varves or tree rings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varve
rpenner, we both simultaneously posted at 11:15 so in that case i will pose the question I asked of Origin to you as well. The question is:
Why do you believe the earth is older than say 10,000 years?
*Do not refer me to "'cause so an so said\says so" give me something concrete and with substance, something we can really sink our teeth into.
Are you implying I can't read, that I have censored your posts, that I choose not to read follow-ups, or that the thread is too difficult to follow? None of those seem to be the case. I'm still hoping for you to make a meaningful response to my large post.
If you can read
this article, and still come back and ask that question with a straight face, you are truly lost.
As for tangible everyday stuff, go put some petrol in your car. Or visit the Grand Canyon, or any other landform that exposes sedimentary layers.
Also:
Frank R. Zindler said:
All doubt as to the annual nature of at least the Swedish varves has recently been dispelled by work done by Ingemar Cato, [11] of the Swedish Geological Survey. Cato has studied varves [still] forming at the present time in the estuary of the Ångermanälven river in northern Sweden. He has proved by direct observation that varves do indeed form as annual deposits and that their thickness is directly related to the amount of material carried in suspension by the river. Now that we know for certain that the Swedish varves are indeed yearly records of the postglacial world, [young-Earth proponents] have to decide what to do with the fact that the varve record at Döviken in Sweden began in 7288 BCE...
...the absurdity grows even greater when one considers the problem [young-Earth proponents] face when they have to account for preglacial varved deposits such as the Eocene Green River Shale, a rock deposit found in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
The Green River Shale is a deposit of soft rocks (including so-called oil-shales) averaging about 2000 feet in thickness and covering an area of 25,000 square miles. A large part of the formation consists of laminated deposits that appear to be varves - apparently over six million of them! The first detailed description of the varved deposits was published back in 1929 by Wilmot H. Bradley, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. [12]
Unlike most modern varved deposits, the Green River varves are very thin, averaging only 0.18 millimeters. In each pair of laminations, one layer is darker in color and much richer in organic material than the other, which often is made of very fine-grained carbonate minerals. Bradley concluded that the varves were annual deposits on the basis of their close resemblance to varves being formed today in certain modern lakes and on the basis of the astronomical rhythms they appear to reflect
...
[11] Ingemar Cato, "The definitive connection of the Swedish geochronology time scale with the present, and the new date of the zero year in Döviken, northern Sweden," Boreas: An International Journal of Quaternary Research, 14 (1985), pp. 117-121.
[12] Wilmot H. Bradley, The varves and climate of the Green River epoch, U.S. Geol. Survey Prof. Paper 158-E, pp. 87-110, 1929. Since the time of Bradley, many geologists have studied the Green River Formation. Not surprisingly, not everything that Bradley said about the formation is still thought to be completely correct. Whereas Bradley thought the Green River lakes to have been of moderate depth, it is now relatively certain that they were extremely shallow, playa lakes. (A playa is a desert basin that temporarily becomes a shallow lake after heavy rains.) While Bradley's conclusion that the laminations were annual varves is now known not to apply to all the parts of the formation, his lowest estimate of the duration of Green River time (five million years) was only twenty percent higher than the results of modern determinations. While it is probable that at least some of the varves reflect less-than-annual periods of deposition, most of Bradley's error seems to have resulted from the method he had to rely on to estimate the total thicknesses of the various types of rock units. He was not able to crawl along the outcrops with a microscope and count all the millions of varves directly. Readers interested in more modern studies of this fascinating geological formation may consult the article "Green River Formation, Wyoming: A Playa-Lake Complex," by Ronald C. Surdam and Claudia A. Wolfbauer (Geol. Soc. of America Bull., Vol. 86, pp. 335-345, 1975), or "Paleoecology of Cyclic Sediments of the Lower Green River Formation, Central Utah," by James L. Baer (Brigham Young University Geology Studies, Vol. 16, Pt. I, pp. 3-95, Dec. 1969).
From
Rock Of Ages and the Ages Of Rock (
American Atheist Magazine, July, 1989)
Also
Creationist Misuse of the Green River Formation (2003)
But the real verification is the consistency of a large number of
independent sources as Rav's source shows. At least as good is this -- in 1987 light from a distant supernova arrived at Earth and as a result of this ancient supernova, a sphere of light reflected off objects distant from the star as the light reached it. By knowing where the star is we can use trigonometry and the current speed of light to predict how large the ring of reflected light will be. That matches the result found 9 months later so the evidence shows the speed of light (and related physics) has been nearly the same for at least 170,000 years. Thus we have confidence in terrestrial science estimates of the age of the Earth well over this figure.
http://web.archive.org/web/20120206021326/http://home.entouch.net/dmd/age.htm
The opinion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is based on nothing. (The bible, for example, does not date the creation of the Earth. Even if you ignore the contradiction between the Earth-centric story mostly in Genesis chapter one and the Man-centric story starting a few verses into chapter two, it could have been quadrillions of years in the garden of Eden before the fall and create no additional contradictions in the narrative.)
Either the world is really really old, or God went to extraordinary lengths to make it look that way.
First i did not mention God, interestingly enough it was yourself and rpenner who mentioned religion.
I do not find it interesting. Reliance on authority figures is the most common source of repeated error in factual opinion, and both religion and politics have reliance on authority figures built in. The notion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old was mainstream Christian dogma prior to the establishment of the principles behind the geological column. Thus most material on young-Earth ideas is old, from groups trying to turn back the clock to decades-old dogma, from groups trying to seize on legitimacy by using the Genesis account as their source of authority, and from Islamic fundamentalists. To deny the origins of this idea is to render it a baseless leading question -- essentially nonsensical. To accept that religious groups were and are the main proponents of such ideas is not dismissing the question, which is why my reference to Genesis is literally parenthetical -- I was explaining that Christian dogma is not literally Christian literalism -- a frequently cited related claim.
You also did not
deny your motive was religious in nature, so you as of yet have entered no basis in the record to (1) hold this opinion or (2) hold the opinion that discussion of the biblical claims of authorities used by many groups is a personally unnecessary tangent.
The opinion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old also explains nothing in that the most basic prediction of the opinion is that nothing on Earth should be more than 10,000 years old and this is wildly contradicted by all sorts of continuous processes that we see that have the self-consistent appearance of continuity to a past that is more than 10,000 years ago. Indeed even our human art-making, tool using past is more than 20,000 years old and thus cannot be a natural coincidence of looking old, but a meticulously planned forgery. Thus, this opinion that is based on nothing and explains nothing is an opinion that matters in the sense that it states that appearance of continuity of physical law applicability is unreliable. If accepted as a general principle, then no scientific test can prove that you ever existed because all evidence that you exist only exists in my past -- a past that your stated opinion tells me is not just a coincidence but actually a malicious forgery. Thus the opinion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is the opinion that all the evidence of the senses and instruments may be an undetectable lie, therefore an opinion that any external source of truth may be an undetectable lie, and indistinguishable from the assumptions that the opinion that the universe came into existence Last Thursday or indeed that I just think I am human and am actually a brain in a jar with all my sensory inputs being elaborate forgeries. Thus the opinion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is an opinion that matters in that it so contradicts the physical record the only way to behave sensibly is to relate this opinion to the scrapheap of meta-physical crap and completely ignore it while constructing working theories of the so-called apparent self-consistency of physical law. All people who publicly hold that opinion as relevant are therefore ignorant people who insist on speaking outside of their area of expertise and demonstrably wasting everyone's time.
You did not deny or argue against the position that the opinion that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old is "meta-physical crap."
The question "how else are we to learn" has past been answered in that: (1) people who know communicate to the ignorant and (2) when no person knows, some people make it their job to find out. That's science. It's completely unclear how one is supposed to imagine us "finding out" the Earth is young when we can count past 10,000 in varves or tree rings.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varve
Rav, just to be clear, the Varve dating is MUCH closer to my statement.
Is this because you trust the counting of obviously annual cycles more than rate arguments like comparing the speed of light to the distances to the furthest galaxies?
Edit: Also I found it interesting that the tree rings in you article go to around 10-11 thousand years old, is that right?
Largely because it is hard to find old trees since old-age, rot and fire take so many of them down after a few millennia. No such problems affect varves as they are driven by geological features like lake bottoms.
The main thing i want to get across to you is how would you know the difference between 10 thousand years old and 5 million based off of appearance?
How would you distinguish between skeletal remains 50 and 500 years old by appearance? You would (1) learn something relevant to the passing of time, (2) you would use the totality of evidence and choose the most parsimonious alternative. Relying just on ignorant interpretations of appearance is detrimental to your alleged goal of seeking truth. But varves are (1) obviously periodic, (2) a trivial annual mechanism accounts for their periodicity, (3) that explanation has been confirmed and (4) the conversion count of layers to years is trivial.
Before we go further and examine this i have come to wonder why these statement based off of instinct alone are made. Are you seriously going to tell us that you can see a difference between a 10K yo rock and 5 mill. yo rock?
Not me. But a expert's knowledge of
rock coatings could likely date exposed rock surfaces in the desert unambiguously between those alternatives.
Thats really supernatural of you. I wish i could do that.
Now who's tone is "not conducive to learning?"
And before you go on about the dating methods, it does work but accuracy beyond thousands of years is mainly guess work.
What i am asking for is THE solid proof, in your opinions, that the Earth is older than say a 5 to 20 thousand years.
Similar to the glacial varves are the varve-like patterns in Green River Shale, with at least 6 million layers with a periodicity that reflects the predicted periodicity of Earth's orbit to double-confirm that that's 6 million years and radioisotope dating triply confirming the hypothesis that annual cycles caused it.
----
I'll start with a simple question: do you dispute the legitimacy of the evidence provided in the link I gave you?
Exactly. Is Stanley trying to learn or trying to get us to parrot an ignorant opinion?
I'll put it another way: do you believe that the earth is less than 10,000 years old?
I believe that it can be.
But do you have a conviction about it? Is a younger earth one of the cornerstones of your world-view?
So you dont think that Earth can be less than billions of years old? Why?
I have credible links that say otherwise
Now we are deep in the land of the double-negative.
----
See, that is what i was referring to in the earlier post. Peoples opinions should not be mocked or stifled because we miss out on so much, not to mention tyranny, bias, ridicule etc.
Hitler's opinions should not be mocked or stifled? Is this your argument? Really? As Mel Brooks illustrated with
Blazing Saddles and
The Producers all some people's opinions are good for is mockery!
I am asking a question, not looking to achieve anything except undeniable TRUTH.
Then start by learning math, logic and science. When you have mastered all of science in an area, then you are equipped to ask new and interesting questions. Better still, you will have been equipped with the tools to pursue the answers.
