The age of the earth, etc.

[NeilFraudstrong]

I am for creationism, the Big Bang, and evolution.

WHO'S WITH ME?

only if you invite my friend "beer before liquor"

SOLD.

[JenLee]

I am for creationism, the Big Bang, and evolution.

WHO'S WITH ME?

only if you invite my friend "beer before liquor"

SOLD.

Do y'all have some odd affinity for barfing? Surely you must remember that enormously useful college axiom: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear."

If you make a habit of drinking your beer first, your night will surely evolve into its own multicolored big bang.

[missbitesalot]

I always heard "Beer before liquor--gets you drunk quicker, liquor before beer--you're in the clear."

[Xenkylm]

I always heard "Beer before liquor--gets you drunk quicker, liquor before beer--you're in the clear."

I'm aware of both, but of the general assumption that a sufficient quantity of either will result in the Big Barf, regardless of mixing order.

[missbitesalot]

Good point.

[Lilly]

Xenkylm,

Great explanation and valid points! I'm going to do some more research on the evidence for young earth vs. old earth. I believe the Biblical account of creation, and adding up the genealogies and such puts the age of the earth at somewhere around six thousand years old. However, the "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" position is not a good position from which to engage in a scientific discussion.

(Incidentally, I was hoping Professor John would jump in to the discussion. Everyone feel free to join!)

[Lilly]

I think I should clarify that my comments are directed toward the young/old earth topic, not the beer/liquor topic.

[Xenkylm]

Xenkylm,

Great explanation and valid points! I'm going to do some more research on the evidence for young earth vs. old earth. I believe the Biblical account of creation, and adding up the genealogies and such puts the age of the earth at somewhere around six thousand years old. However, the "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" position is not a good position from which to engage in a scientific discussion.

(Incidentally, I was hoping Professor John would jump in to the discussion. Everyone feel free to join!)

I'm glad you're still interested in continuing this As long as everyone remembers that it's ok to hold onto their beliefs while having a reasonable conversation about this stuff, hopefully it can continue to be an interesting/fun discussion.

I'm also wondering where Professor John went!

I think I should clarify that my comments are directed toward the young/old earth topic, not the beer/liquor topic.

hah! Yes, that does seem to be the more productive of the two debates

[bengland]

Interesting that this subject should come up, since it's a great bit of trivia I learned as an undergrad at UC-Davis. Alcohol is absorbed much more readily in the intestine than the stomach. But the high alcohol content of hard liquor causes the pylorus to constrict, thereby keeping booze in the stomach longer where it only slowly enters your blood. Conversely, the CO2 in beer has a pylorus relaxing effect, sending it on its merry way to the intestine where its alcohol is more quickly picked up. Therefore, mixing beer and booze tends to get the booze past the pylorus much more quickly, resulting in the quicker intoxication beloved by frat boys. I'm not sure why the order of the mixing should make any difference though...

[egomet_bonmot]

I'm asking this out of genuine, snark-free curiosity: How do people who believe that the earth is only a couple of thousand years old explain carbon dating?

Same way they explain fossils: Satan's test.

I'm not joking. Go into the Bible Belt and ask around. Don't trip over the cow.

[missbitesalot]

I'm asking this out of genuine, snark-free curiosity: How do people who believe that the earth is only a couple of thousand years old explain carbon dating?

Easy. They feel that carbon dating is flawed. (And btw a couple thousand is a little low...most people of the young earth school feel that the earth is anywhere from 5-10,000 years old.)

[ninjapirate]

There ya go; MissBitesAlot, NeilFraudstrong, JenLee, et.al. have just completely disproven the theory of evolution. Left to itself, nature will always dissolve into an entropic morass, not organize itself into a new life form.

Just for the record, I myself am a Biblical creationist who believes the earth is probably about 6000 years old according to calculations done from genealogies in the Pentateuch, carbon dating is a lot of hooey (where's the baseline??) and God created the earth in a literal six days. There are dinosaurs in the Bible, too. Check Job 41, Isaiah 27 and Psalm 104. Hundreds of years before Ptolemy, Columbus or Magellan, God told us the earth was round in the 40th chapter of Isaiah. I also read in the paper a while back about British astro-seismologists who listened to the stars by extracting radio waves from frequency, amplitude and phase. There's a scripture I can't find right now about the music of the stars or something like that. Now, I know that I'm not likely to sway evolutionists' beliefs and they aren't going to change mine, but it's still interesting to debate.

[missbitesalot]

There ya go; MissBitesAlot, NeilFraudstrong, JenLee, et.al. have just completely disproven the theory of evolution. Left to itself, nature will always dissolve into an entropic morass, not organize itself into a new life form.

Just for the record, I myself am a Biblical creationist who believes the earth is probably about 6000 years old according to calculations done from genealogies in the Pentateuch, carbon dating is a lot of hooey (where's the baseline??) and God created the earth in a literal six days. There are dinosaurs in the Bible, too. Check Job 41, Isaiah 27 and Psalm 104. Hundreds of years before Ptolemy, Columbus or Magellan, God told us the earth was round in the 40th chapter of Isaiah. I also read in the paper a while back about British astro-seismologists who listened to the stars by extracting radio waves from frequency, amplitude and phase. There's a scripture I can't find right now about the music of the stars or something like that. Now, I know that I'm not likely to sway evolutionists' beliefs and they aren't going to change mine, but it's still interesting to debate.

I blame entropy for stuff on an almost daily basis.

[ninjapirate]

Yep. I look around me and realize my house is a textbook example.

And by that previous comment, meant the disintegration of the thread, not you personally

[missbitesalot]

[John]

If there was a Big Bang, there must have been time before the Big Bang.

This is a common misunderstanding. As with most of modern physics I can't get my mind comfortably wrapped around it either, but that doesn't make it nonsense! Hawking uses the analogy that talking about time before the big bang is meaningless in the same way that it is impossible to continue proceeding north from the north pole. That's about the only thing I retained from his little bestseller.

It all depends, do you think time is linear or not? I'd like to find one example of a person who experienced non-linear time. I don't believe it is possible except in math and on paper. In reality, I highly doubt it is possible.

Didn't Hawking also mention it is possible the universe is not expanding quickly enough, that the gravity at the center might cause the universe to collapse? If that is true, then were there 1000 big bangs?

Science to me is like really good fiction. I don't believe most of it is true. I think Science is just the best theory at the moment. What is nice about Christianity is we know there are absolute truths. We know the universe won't collapse. We know our destination is heaven.

I would rather believe Jesus because he performed miracles and proved he was speaking the truth, than a scientist who is guessing and has to accept new theories every 10 or 20 years to replace old ones that failed.

[bengland]

It all depends, do you think time is linear or not? I'd like to find one example of a person who experienced non-linear time. I don't believe it is possible except in math and on paper. In reality, I highly doubt it is possible.

Do you believe that clocks will keep different time depending on how fast they're moving? Because that experiment's been done. They do.

[Xenkylm]

Science to me is like really good fiction. I don't believe most of it is true. I think Science is just the best theory at the moment.

I think the general misconception is that science is supposed to "be true" or "prove something." It's generally not. The goal of science usually IS to find the best theory at the moment. It's possible that something will be proven, but often that doesn't adequacy of previous observations, it just puts them into greater context (think of pre-gravity observations of the movements of the planets. Were those wrong? no. Proven? no. Knowledge of ellipses was pretty much all it took.) That's why we always butt heads in these debates. Science is not trying to "prove" that the earth is 4+billion years old. Instead, the goal is to explain as much as possible with the most plausible theory, making only those assumptions that can eventually be targeted and tested.

There are things on this planet that have been dated at 4+billion years (with, as I understand it, more than just carbon dating). There are things in the solar system dated at around the same age, and there is converging evidence that the accumulation of some minerals on the earth likely have required millions of years or more. Thus, the most reasonable conclusion, from the standpoint of science, is that the earth is also so old. Are other explanations possible? YES! But they require additional assumptions, and often include at least one that is untestable. If you can propose a theory of the age of the earth that includes a young age without drawing upon such assumptions (and explains as much or more of the empirical data), then we can have a more reasoned debate about it.

Remember, if you think EITHER view has been "proven," you're probably wrong. So everyone stop acting like you're right, k?

/off to work
//hopes this won't turn into a flame war. stay on the ball, people!

[krf100]

I'm thinking I must not understand the meaning of the word "proof".

[rkd]

Science to me is like really good fiction. I don't believe most of it is true. I think Science is just the best theory at the moment.

There are things on this planet that have been dated at 4+billion years (with, as I understand it, more than just carbon dating). ...

Remember, if you think EITHER view has been "proven," you're probably wrong. So everyone stop acting like you're right, k?

C-14 dating only works up to 50,000 years or so; the half-life of C-14 is something like 5730 years, so a sample which is (say) 40,000 years old would be down to about 1/128 of its original C-14; C-14 is a less abundant isotope than C-12 to begin with, so it's hard to get a good test beyond 9-10 half-lives. Other radioisotope dating methods are used for older samples. Potassium-argon has a half-life on the order of 1.25 billion years; various uranium decay patterns have half-lives ranging from the hundreds of thousands to the billions of years; and many other exponential decay tests exist. This isn't my area of specialty, but I don't think there's any age range without at least a couple of reliable radioisotopes available. Depending on the sample, the radioisotopic age is usually derived from measuring as many of these tests as possible. Other isotopic relations are useful in studying the history of a sample; for instance, certain decays may only be energetically favorable in a certain age range, so measuring those isotopes can give us insight into past conditions. And of course short-half-life radioisotopes (I-131, Tc-99, C-13, O-15, etc) are enormously useful in medical scans. But I'm getting off track.

I don't have much desire to get involved with this thread, but I did want to note that Xenkylm's discussion of proof a couple of posts ago is representative of a "philosophy of science" perspective rather than a ... for lack of a ... I'll call it a working science perspective. I don't mean either term pejoratively; I mean that philosophy of science has different (and to be honest, often abtruse) definitions of what constitutes proof of a real-world phenomenon. From a working science perspective, a date on the order of 4.5 billion years for the age of Earth is pretty darn solid. Just for a date of less than several billion years, one would have to find other means to explain ... off the top of my head ... a wide variety of seemingly solid radioisotopic dating studies; stratigraphy patterns all over the place; the composition of our atmosphere based on priniciples of gas diffusion; temperature patterns of the internal earth (which imply a high age based on heat diffusion rates); various biological and anthropological finds; there's just far too much for me to address things specifically, and it comes from a variety of scientific fields (geology has some evidence too). And that's just for an age less than the billions. An attempt to justify an age on the order of 6,000 years would run into a mountain of other obstacles, even those as simple as dendrochronical studies of the bristlecone pine; the tree ring record runs back 9,000 years or so. &c., &c., &c. My point is that while one could argue that "proof" of the date has not been found, there's an extraordinary amount of evidence to support an age on the order of 4.5 billion years, give or take a few hundred million.

--Raj Dhuwalia, who should be packing for a trip

(EDIT: added missing apostrophe in "its." And I'm moving to the L.A. area -- leaving tomorrow on the cross-country drive. Zoiks.)

[Xenkylm]

--Raj Dhuwalia, who should be packing for a trip

I hope you're going somewhere nice

[Vorotyntsev]

We know our destination is heaven.

Where is heaven?

[NeilFraudstrong]

I am for creationism, the Big Bang, and evolution.

WHO'S WITH ME?

only if you invite my friend "beer before liquor"

SOLD.

Do y'all have some odd affinity for barfing? Surely you must remember that enormously useful college axiom: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear."

If you make a habit of drinking your beer first, your night will surely evolve into its own multicolored big bang.

Those who abide by that acronymn are rookies.

[JenLee]

I am for creationism, the Big Bang, and evolution.

WHO'S WITH ME?

only if you invite my friend "beer before liquor"

SOLD.

Do y'all have some odd affinity for barfing? Surely you must remember that enormously useful college axiom: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear."

If you make a habit of drinking your beer first, your night will surely evolve into its own multicolored big bang.

Those who abide by that acronymn are rookies.

And those that scoff at those who do should have their tolerance studied by science, because dayum. :wink:

[NeilFraudstrong]

I am for creationism, the Big Bang, and evolution.

WHO'S WITH ME?

only if you invite my friend "beer before liquor"

SOLD.

Do y'all have some odd affinity for barfing? Surely you must remember that enormously useful college axiom: "Beer before liquor, never sicker. Liquor before beer, never fear."

If you make a habit of drinking your beer first, your night will surely evolve into its own multicolored big bang.

Those who abide by that acronymn are rookies.

And those that scoff at those who do should have their tolerance studied by science, because dayum.

For the record, I am not a drunk.

Whiskey makes me cry.