Let's not debate creationism in the News thread
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@dkf said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
We cannot prove that God didn't just create everything last Thursday,
Um, actually, I think you mean THOR'S Day?
And yet you bring up Christianity. Interesting.
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@gribnit said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
If free will exists
This sign in front of a lawyer's office near me cracks me the fuck up every time I see it.
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@djls45 said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
You're assuming that the materials in the sample are evenly distributed. That's not always going to be true, especially the larger the sample is.
OK, I think we're going to have to stop right here, because there seems to be a fundamental error in the way you're thinking (or at least how it sounds to me). You seem to believe that datation is done on a rock that is assumed to be a somewhat continuous mix of elements. Have you actually read anything on datation, or done some basic geology (i.e. looked at some rocks under an optical microscope, a SEM, or played with a spectrometer)?
That is what I was hinting to in my previous post, but clearly you've missed it: datation is (usually) done on individual minerals of a rock, or even in some cases inclusions inside minerals. So we are looking at samples that are chemically homogeneous. That's not pulled out of my ass, that's what the chemical analysis of minerals tells us. So yes, the "materials" (i.e. the chemical elements used for datation) are evenly distributed within the "samples" (the minerals). Moreover, if you've actually seen (or done) any datation, you should know that many samples and measures are taken through several minerals, so we know that the results are indeed representative of the whole and not just some random noise (which, of course, every measurement process has, especially one dealing with such minute quantities!).
Unless you're assuming some form of "erosion" that actually changes the amount of one specific (daughter) element, while leaving the rest of the chemical balance of the mineral unchanged (including the amount of parent element). But you'll have to first point me to such a process, then show me that this process is not accounted for in datation.
The type of erosion would include anything that breaks pieces off of the sample, so... every type of erosion. If there's any type of variance of the composition across the sample, then any erosion will affect the ratios.
Again, show me an erosion process that changes the chemical balance of a single element in a single mineral, without changing the rest of the chemical balance or cristalline structure of the mineral (i.e. without leaving any trace of that change happening, apart from changing one element's ratio).
Please give me an actual existing and documented process, not just a "that could happen". If you're just sticking to possible theoretical ideas without any grounding in facts, we're not discussing science any more.
There's really no way around the fact that the original composition has to be assumed, and that assumption invalidates the results.
True, but for one thing you haven't until now shown anything that really causes any reason to reject our current assumptions.
But that flaw is such a serious one that the dating system affected by it is fundamentally unusable.
Why is that? All the results we get are indeed dependent on this assumption. But we haven't yet seen anything that causes us to reconsider that assumption, and the results that we get by using a theory that is built on top of it are consistent with what we can observe around us. So until you can actually show something else, why is that wrong?
And I should point out that this assumption, or a similar one, is actually used in much of science. All the theories we build are built on the assumption that a measure of something done here and now should give the same result as the same measure done at another time and another place (assuming you're not measuring something that explicitly depends on it... I'm talking about stuff like measuring Ohm's law or Newton's law). The same assumption is done in geology: that the ratios that were present at closure of a chemical system are the same ratios as those that would happen if we close the same chemical system nowadays, in a lab (in the same overall pressure/temperature/source materials/... as happened in the Earth). This is the assumption we are making. That what happened in the Earth is what happens in the lab when we reproduce the experiment.
So again, if you have any actual, factual evidence of this assumption being wrong, state it. Not some hand-waving of "we don't know" or "it could be". Otherwise, I don't see why that assumption being an assumption-that-has-never-been-broken-and-that-gives-good-results is be a problem.
The publicized ones have been chosen to maintain the illusion of uniformity in dating methods.
Let me simplify: "the authors are lying (therefore I can ignore whatever has been published)". Well, if that's what you believe, unfortunately no discussion is possible.
I am willing to discuss actual specific examples and see whether a given paper might be wrong or not. Not a press release, an actual (recent-ish) published paper. I am not prepared to discuss blanket statements like this that are all about what you want to believe rather than scientific facts.
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@Lorne-Kates said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
@gribnit said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
If free will exists
This sign in front of a lawyer's office near me cracks me the fuck up every time I see it.
Is he related to Good Will Hunting?
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Let's not debate creationism in the News thread:
People existed just fine for millennia before science was a thing.
No. Ignorance is not "just fine". We've worked hard at understanding our world and we're now enjoying the fruits of it. I side with the people who share this drive to discover and don't accept empty answers.
Who am I? (the nature of the self)
A copy of a most successful lifeform on earth. Your advanced brain is even able to simulate your own appearance to others which gives you a sense of self. The individual human simulation is primarly concerned with establishing coherence of sensory input and will confabulate freely to maintain coherence. It's funny to watch.
To expand: We have an innate trust in this simulation we cannot sidestep even if its product is clearly nonsensical from an outside view. This trust leads to your three basic questions. A useful handle for it is "naïve realism".
Where did I come from/Where am I going? (persistence of self)
There is evidence that the sense of self we enjoy today is a recent cultural introduction. Likely you got the idea from your parents. It's not persistent either: you lose it completely everytime you go to deep sleep.
Cultures as recent as the ancient Greeks saw themselves as driven by passions they attributed to outside influences. The idea that the voices in our head have no external source, that they are us, can be linked to the introduction of monotheism. It wasn't a clean process, but the rejection of spirit narrators from our heads allowed societies to flourish that would have been impossible before.
Why am I here? (purpose of existence)
Biologically? To multiply. Socially? To further group success. Emotionally? To follow your passion. Democratically? To vote for your lizard so the other lizard doesn't get in. There is no universal purpose. We create it. We live it. Pick well.
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I just had a good Sunday morning read: On a Piece of Chalk, by Thomas Henry Huxley.
Thus you have within the limits of your own county, proof that the chalk can justly claim a very much greater antiquity than even the oldest physical traces of mankind. But we may go further and demonstrate, by evidence of the same authority as that which testifies to the existence of the father of men, that the chalk is vastly older than Adam himself.
What got me there was actually https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1022534132415356928 with a beatiful close-up of chalk. And the whole thing reminded me of this passage in Terre des hommes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: (The English translation "Wind, Sand and Stars" seems to be under copyright still.)
“A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust.”
My prophet.
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