Firstly JesusFreak, you need to reduce the number of questions you ask at the same time, otherwise our posts will start to fill entire pages and become unreadable. Secondly you need to start making proper use of the quote buttons. The way you post replies makes it difficult to see who's saying what.
There are many alternative creation dogmas that peg the world at different ages. Maybe the baptist-run intelligent design movement says it's 6000, but they make up but a small fraction of the world's superstitious population.
What are you references for this information? Or is this just a generalization you came up with.
If you're talking about the existence of other religions (I assume you're not), anyone who doesn't live in a tin shack out in the woods knows there are many other supernatural worldviews out there. As far as the Intelligent Design movement being dominated by southern baptists, I cite the denominations of leading individuals in the movement such as William Dembski and Kent Hovind. Plus the Catholic church has already condemned this whole movement, so I don't think they'd be behind it.
Prior to the "big bang" there was "nothing" no matter, no space, not even time. Prior to what they call a "singularity" there was nothing.
That's not what science says. Noone knows what happened prior to the Big Bang. Our theories aren't developed enough to even describe the very first instant of the universe, let alone what came before. We don't even know if words such as "before" have any physical meaning when talking about the Big Bang.
Everything began the moment the singularity appeared and began to expand. There could have been no natural cause because everything began at this moment. You can look this up on the NASA website.
That's pure conjecture on your part. Science doesn't say all of existence began at this point, only that the universe as we know it began there. Show me a specific NASA quote that says otherwise and where you found it.
CptBork said:
The age of the universe is not an assumption. It's calculated based on literally millions of different pieces of evidence found here on earth and in the detailed analysis of starlight...
Please just give me a few of these "millions of different pieces of evidence" instead of hurling elephants.
Let's start with cosmic evidence. Stars that form in known processes take a certain period of time to reach the states they are in today, putting a minimum bound on the age of the universe. Cosmic microwave background temperature measurements put a very precise estimate on how long it's been since the Big Bang. Hubble redshift measurements tell us about the rate of expansion of the universe and together with general relativity allow us to calculate how long it's been since every point in the universe was located at the singularity. And these are just a few of the methods being used today to date the universe. Each of these measurements can be reproduced consistently, again and again, using millions of different sets of stars and galaxies as independent data sets to double check results. See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_universe. I haven't even mentioned Earth-based evidence and I'm really just scratching the surface here. When scientists talk about billions of years, it's not just some figure they came up with while watching football.
Are you saying there is no miracles happening today on a daily basis. Is your realm of experience enough to give you such an all encompassing knowledge that you can claim that something does not occur or exist? This is a questionable claim. By the way, do some research math and evolution are not friends. :bugeye:
There have simply been no scientifically documented, proven miracles. Ever. Not even close. These days even the Vatican is starting to back away from declaring supernatural miracles when it canonizes people, because the scientific scrutiny has become much more intense now than it used to be when eyewitness testimony was taken at face value. As far as mathematical miracles go, the probability of obtaining any specific outcome in the universe is infinitesimally small. The probability of obtaining a collection of qualitatively similar outcomes is infinitely greater. The true probability of lifeforms similar to us emerging somewhere in the universe is as yet unknown, because there are an absurd number of unknown variables we have no way of accounting for. The attempts of the intelligent design movement to calculate or estimate these probabilities are nothing less than idiotic.
Nothing existed prior to the big bang- typo on my part. Yet it is still a valid question. Do you believe that anything that had a definite beginning has no cause? You can keep arguing in circles but something had to have no beginning- I just find it easier to believe that God is it and the cause. There had to be a cause. Just show me anything in this universe that had a beginning without a cause.
You just don't get it. Current theories suggest time as we know it started at the Big Bang. "Before" is a useless word in describing the first moment. That means for all we know, the universal laws at the point of the Big Bang don't include the need for causality. We simply don't know, and our point is that you Bible thumpers don't know either.
CptBork said:
If creatures were able to reproduce uncontrollably and indefinitely, evolution as we know it would have never occurred. You see there's this thing called food, and there's only so much of it that can be grown and produced at any given time here on this lovely planet. When a population gets too big and the inevitable resource crunch hits, creatures start dying off, survival of the fittest takes over and, wonder of wonders, this is when natural selection operates to produce evolution.
Well we don't all have a PHD like you. I guess you would rather have us take whatever is given to us without any critical thinking. I admit I do not have all the answers and I am still learning, maybe someday I can have the abundant knowledge you have so I too can make hasty generalizations, logical fallacies, and still feel pretty smart.
I don't have a Ph.D. at the moment, although that's what I'm working towards. The thing is, the food argument is pretty simple, no? You don't need a Ph.D. to understand that one, and it's so simple that noone should miss it when they spend a proper amount of time critically analyzing these ideas. So don't you think it bizarre that supposedly well-educated expert Intelligent Design proponents are putting forth these poorly considered arguments? Anyone can mock a straw man, how about the real thing?
As far as committing to further learning, good! That's what we want! Go ahead and learn this stuff for yourself and then criticize it all you want from an informed viewpoint. If you analyze things like the theory of evolution properly, you will learn over time that the theory is far more logically constructed than you think. And maybe you'll start wondering just how well informed your present informants really are.
Isn't the present the key to the past? Many of the arguments for evolution rely on the premise that the conditions at the present have not changed much over time e.g. carbon dating.
Oh things change, alright. Continents shift all the time, this has been thoroughly measured and, from time to time, felt (earthquakes). Have you not noticed how South America and Africa almost look like they could fit together on a jigsaw puzzle? All our evidence indicates that at one time these continents were joined at the hip, and over a period of millions of years, the single major world landmass (Pangea) ripped apart and became the world as we see it today. As for carbon dating, of course it relies on many assumptions about external conditions. But fossils come in many varieties. Some have been exposed to the atmosphere, some are trapped deep inside sediment deposits where gases can't enter or escape. Everything must be accounted for when attempting to conclude something with scientific certainty, and this is one reason why many different, independent methods are used to measure the same thing over and over in virtually every branch of science.
CptBork said:
The Earth's magnetic field operates on a cycle. It is getting weaker now, is expected to virtually disappear for a bit and then eventually it will come back and start gaining strength again. Point nullified.
What evidence is there that it will get stronger again. Point is not nullified. Your argument is circular. For example, how old are the fossils? Well by the rock layer they are found in. How do we know the age of the rock layer? By the fossils found in them.
Traces of the past behaviour of the Earth's magnetic field can be found in abundant geological evidence. Plus current theories of physics and geophysics have a pretty decent understanding of how the Earth's magnetic field is produced and how it operates. Everything points towards a cyclic behaviour, possibly resulting in an eventual shift in the north and south poles (which happen to be moving around all the time anyhow).
As for dating things like fossils and rock layers, usually the rock layers take precedent. Even in Darwin's time, scientists were already dating certain geological formations as having an age in the range of 1 billion years. It was a major influence on his work, and modern science with a vastly larger array of tools continues to confirm it.
Reference please. Yes there are other types of dating and these are not 100% either. Much speculation and assumption comes into play. Bring up the dating methods you have in mind and then we can debate them. But Please! Stop wasting my time with elephants!!
I'm not a textbook, you're perfectly capable of doing your own research on the various methods of dating fossils and formations. The point of using multiple methods of dating is that they all operate independently of each other, on completely different sets of assumptions. When each method points to the same result, that strongly suggests the validity of the underlying assumptions, because the chances of these methods all agreeing are very slim if the assumptions were bad.
As far as debating the validity of methods such as radioactive dating, I just completed a graduate course in nuclear physics and I'd be happy to take you up on it, but you should make it a separate topic in the physics section so the real experts have a chance to join in.
