Actually, you wouldn't use carbon dating for dinosaur skeletons - Carbon dating isn't accurate that far back. You would use another radiometric dating technique, though, and they're all pretty much the same - all that differs is which set of radioactive isotopes is being compared. Some have longer half-lives, so the technique is accurate further back, but less accurate for more recent things.
In fact, trying to use radiometric dating techniques on anything from the past 1000 years or so just won't work. It just isn't accurate enough to give a sane answer there. That's why all those 'Look, this hamburger box was dated at ten thousand years ago!' things are really, really stupid - they're misapplying a dating technique into a situation it doesn't work in.
I believe Bishop Ussher's date was 4004 BC, James. About 6000 years.
Seriously though, James. Come off it. You're not really a Christian. =p
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"Fossils and carbon dating? Of course those are tools of satan"
Is there any evidence that these fossils are really fossils, and not some strange fluke of nature? Or, more likely, placed there to give us a choice other than God? | |
Ever heard of Ockham's Razor, James? You're just inserting bullshit here now. The instant your God starts fucking with what we see, you've hopped off the deep end. If EVERY MEASUREMENT WE MAKE is flawed because your god screws with nature so that our observations are wrong, we can't conclude anything. Somehow, I think it's unlikely that you're omnibenevolent deity is an asshole of a trickster.
Fossils are real. There isn't any other reason why there are so many freaking skeletons made out of rock in the rocks! What do you think archaeologists do, carve them out of marble? Stop being a dick. Furthermore, you didn't say anything about radiometric dating. Let me guess - God set it up so that we can have a choice other then him. Bullshit artist. | |
No no no Jp. You see, god lays truths down in the holy babbl.... I mean bible and then gives fake things that directly conflict with them. And our jobs, being the clever fundamentalists, is to find these conflictions and bring the light of god to destroy what god created in the first place? Now, doesn't that make sense? No? Then I guess I have to resort to brainwashing.
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Damn it you two. James may sound looney right now but can you PLEASE lay off the Bible-bashing? It's very tiring to listen to, doesn't make you sound convincing at all (given who you're you're talking to) and makes you just as annoying as him.
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I haven't been doing that - at least recently. I was bashing the creationist God just recently.
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Oh. Sorry. I was wrong to point you two out in particular. Those were the most recent comments I saw and when every single religious conversation comes up, people love to circlejerk to it. It's hideously tiring to listen to when you're not the one who started it. :-/
I know I could just "not click these things" but watching comment numbers explode is a dead ringer that it's going on anyway. | |
FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT. i do not belive in god althou my family is a christian family i dumped my religion i cannot belive that there is an all powerful being that can do what ever the hell he wants and dosent i mean what would you do if you had control over people?
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FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT. Excuse me? Is there anything more overdone than either ragging on religion, or trying to disprove it with a couple paragraphs? It gets old. | |
I'm in agreement that Christianity is pretty hokey, but I'm half/half on theism and atheism. I personally think it's perfectly possible that we were intelligently created, by something; I believe it a lot more than "we just always were."
To me, Christianity does have some things going for it, and that's just that it seems pretty likely that what happened to jesus and such at least appeared true, and jesus is the center of christianity. I realize that it's something that got passed down for god knows long and the bible was made by crazy prophets, but the whole jesus stuff seems real to me. Either way, it's an question we will never conclude, because it's not something we can know "how" it happened because it's too complex for our human brains (or too complex for anything for that matter), we can only see the results and guess. I do think there is way too much evidence showing that some type of spiritual world/beings exist. I believe that all the way, whether it's a different dimension or God's gift to earth, I don't know, but I think it's there. [edit] If you're trying to claim that the brain isn't the seat of the mind, you're being an idiot Don't be so ignorant of the other oppinion until you can say that we know everything about the mind. Our minds are amazingly powerful, I'm not sure that spirit has anything to do with our minds, but don't act like you know that everything is the way we see it today. The mind hasn't been fully explained, not by a long shot. | |
Don't be so ignorant of the other oppinion until you can say that we know everything about the mind. The mind has been pretty damned well explained. And we don't need to explain the mind to know that it resides wholly in the brain. When you die, brain activity ceases. Damaging the brain changes patterns of behaviour, even things as complex as personality. You can watch the brain changing as people think about, or see different things. The brain is the seat of the mind. Introducing some sort of Cartesian duality is just unneccessary. Even better, various animals display several signs of intelligence. Chimpanzees and even magpies can construct new tools from old stuff - without being 'taught' it. There's a famous example of a magpie bending a piece of wire in order to pull a grub out of a hole and eat it - this was observed under laboratory conditions. I think the ability to create new tools is indicative of intelligence. I believe it a lot more than "we just always were." Do you have any idea what you're talking about? The current scientific model does NOT say that 'we just always were'. In fact, the current scientific model posits the Big Bang, an event that didn't create the current universe so much as was the creation of the current universe. Around about 10 billion years ago is the accepted figure. Note that the Big Bang has craploads of experimental evidence going for it. Of course, the Big Bang was also the creation of time/space. Which means there was no time before the Big Bang, and that, therefore, there was no 'before the Big Bang'. In that sense, the universe has existed forever, because there was no time for it to not exist in at any other point. WE, however, in the shape of humans, haven't existed very long at all. Maybe 100,000 years. Maybe 200,000. Maybe, and let's just be crazy here, maybe a million years. That's the utter, utter limit. The Earth has existed for approximately 3.5 billion years, according to radiometric dating. We have NOT existed forever, according to science. We've existed for the barest blink of an eyelid. I do think there is way too much evidence showing that some type of spiritual world/beings exist. I believe that all the way, whether it's a different dimension or God's gift to earth, I don't know, but I think it's there. I assume you mean that there is evidence for whatever nonsensical misapplication of terminology you're using there (A different dimension is a different thing you can measure stuff on. The x axis, for example, or the t axis. Several physical hypotheses for a Grand Unified Theory specify additional dimensions in addition to the four we currently know of, but that isn't the same as a whole 'nother universe, which is what you're talking about. You're talking about another set of dimensions. It's an entirely different concept.) If that is true, and you ARE saying there is evidence for some sort of spiritual thingy, then please show me it. You won't be able to. There is NO credible evidence, what-so-ever. And just FYI, if you can produce some, under controlled conditions, you can win a million dollars from one James Randi - here. Although you should be aware that nobody has ever managed to produce any results at all. | |
its easy to think that we understand things because its hard to imagine what we don't understand.
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"FINALLY SOMEONE SAYS IT. i do not belive in god althou my family is a christian family i dumped my religion i cannot belive that there is an all powerful being that can do what ever the hell he wants and dosent i mean what would you do if you had control over people?"
Yes, but God is not human. Thats a flaw most religons seem to base themselves off of. That their god behaves and thinks the ways humans expect him to, while Christians know that the Lord cannot be anticipated, he can never be fully understood, and we should stop trying to understand him. Also, Jp, you do know that alot of evidence points away from the big bang, right? In fact, it is currently by no means the common theory, just one you have latched onto. Now, onto radiometric dating: My religion states that God created the world. Now, wouldn't someone who had all power be able to create this world already a couple billion years old?? Back to big bang: On that note, couldn't someone who was all powerful also creater the universe so that it continually expands, the founding evidence behind the Big Bang? Whatever scientific evidence says, it can easily be disputed by the Christian faith. | |
You Christians can use the same argument over and over. "God dunnit".
The funny thing is, all you have is faith. Other than that, you've got nothing to back up what you say other than a book written a couple hundred years ago. | |
That's why it's called faith, Kami.
That's also why you don't see most Christians trying to use their faith as fact in the first place. | |
"a couple hundred years ago."
And most fo the books in the book were written well over a thousand, close to 2. Also, theirs a book Ive been reading- The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. It in itself does not outright prove Christianity, but ti does dispel most of the common arguements against it, using scientific fact. | |
How can one have faith in something that they cannot support by fact? That just blows my mind.
edit: That's most of what I've seen, I'm not saying that it can't be done, even though I believe it can't. | |
That's why it's called FAITH. To hold a belief in something that can neither be provden or disproven.
If you have evidence for something, you're not believing it on faith because it's right there. | |
Fossils and carbon dating? Of course those are tools of satan