Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Kosh · 05-28-2003, 09:04 PM

Once again, for the sake of the lurkers here:

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The difference is the type of evidence. With Jesus and the resurrection,
there were witnesses who verified that Jesus rose from the dead (well over
500) and they were living and writing about it and reading about it. The
Gospel accounts have over 24,000 copies and fragments. (See the Josh
McDowell book for this research as well.) They verified that the earliest
copies were easily within 25 years of the resurrection for people to read. This
simply means that the people who witnessed the events were alive and
reading the Gospels and verified that resurrection, the feedings of the 5000
and 4000 did take place. They agreed and the fulfillments of Judaism took
place. These documents (which are eyewitness accounts) and extra Biblical
writing such as Josephus verified the resurrection via legal historical proof.

1. We DO NOT have "over 500" witnesses who testified that Jesus rose from the dead. That claim comes from one of Pauls letters (or was it Acts) where Paul claims that over 500 people saw Jesus. However, we don't have writings from one single person in the group. We don't have names or even "oral tradition" about who they were. The entire claim is widely recognized as exageration. And since Pauls letters date to no less than 25 years after the fact, no way that readers of his letters could have verified the fact.

2. There my be 24,000 copies of the NT, but they are all LATE copies. The earliest copies we have date to the 4th century AD. NT "fragments" from the 1st century account for .002 percent of the NT.

3. The date of the earliest Gospel (Mark) is dated by Biblical scholars (the honest ones) to no earlier than 70 ad. That's 40 years after the alleged events, and unlikely that the witnesses (or non-witnesses) would have been alive still.

4. The "Fullfillments" of Judaism were bunk. See the II prophecies section for complete documentation of how bad Mathews "prophecies" were.

5. Josephus NEVER wrote that Jesus rose from the dead. HIs passage which mentions Jesus ("He was the Christ") is hotly contested and widely believed to be a later Christian interpolation (for those of you not familiar with that word, it means that they "added" it into the text to fit their agenda). We have ZERO extra-NT writings to even claim that Jesus existed, let alone rose from the dead.

Browse the II library for complete and utter refutation of Josh McDowells claims, or come to the BCA forum where all this has been disclosed ad nauseum.

So the queston still holds for AIG: "Where you there?"

ps418 · 05-29-2003, 08:22 AM

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Question 6: What about dating methods?

Bible: Dating is best done by written account of eyewitnesses as recorded in the Bible.

Evolution: Dating should be done by uniformitarian methods (only some of them).

Uniformitarian methods make the assumption that the rate we measure NOW has always been the same.

And these assumptions can be independently tested, and pass with flying colors. For instance, the concordance of plate velocity estimates derived from Milankovitch dating, radiometric dating, and GPS satellite measurements provide very strong evidence that decay rates, orbital geometry, and plate velocities have remained constant or nearly so over many millions of years. See for example:

Baksi, A.K., 1994. Concordant sea-floor spreading rates obtained from geochronology, astrochronology and space geodesy, Geophysics Research Letters 21, pp. 133-136.

Another example is the production rates of in situ cosmogenic nuclides, which are used to date surfaces. You can test for constancy of production rate by comparing the experimentally determined rate to the rates determined from geologic calibration. The only reason you'd expect the two rate estimates to agree is if the production rate has remained had remained relatively constant on average. And they do agree, which supports the validity of the method. From my article:

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Obviously, the accumulation of cosmogenic nuclides can not be used to date anything unless we know something about the rates at which they are produced, both now and in the past. The rates at which cosmogenic nuclides are produced in rocks and minerals at the earth's surface have been estimated by three methods. The first method is by prediction from a numerical simulation based on probabilities of the nuclear interactions involved in the production of TCNs, such as the model of Masarik and Reedy (1995). The second method is by direct experimental measurements and/or extrapolation from direct experimental measurements (e.g. Nishiizumi et al., 1989). The third method is by geologic calibration -- using surfaces of independently well-constrained ages, such as landslide exposures, lava flows, and glacially- striated bedrock (e.g. Dunai and Wijbrans, 2000; Kubik et al., 1998).

Remarkably, production rates derived from the three methods are very similar, ranging from a high of ~119 atoms/gm/yr for 3He in olivine (Licciardi et al., 1999), to a low of about 5.1 �0.3 atoms/gm/yr for 10Be in quartz (Stone, 1999). This shows that changes in TCN production rates have not been profound over the calibrated time range. For example, the production rate of 10Be in quartz predicted by the model of Masarik and Reedy (1995) is 5.97 atoms/gm/yr. The values derived from geologic calibration have ranged from about 4.74 - 6.4, with the current best-estimate being 5.1 �0.3 (Stone, 1999). These values agree remarkably well with the modern production-rate value of 5.21�0.278 determined through the use of water targets (Nishiizumi et al., 1996). The production rate of 21Ne in quartz calculated by Masarik and Reedy (1995) is 18.4 atoms/gm/yr. The production rate derived from geologic calibration using a 13ka surface is 19�3.7 (Niedermann, 2000). Again, these values agree with the modern production rates of 16.3 derived from only a few years of data (Graf et al., 1996). The production rate of 3He in olivine is calculated by Masarik and Reedy (1995) as 105, while long-term, geologically-calibrated rates of ~116-120 are derived from radiometrically-dated lava flows ranging from a few thousand (Licciardi et al., 1999) to over a million (Dunai and Wijbrans, 2000) years.

http://www.geocities.com/earthhistory/tcn.htm

And of course there are plenty of other examples. For instance, 14C dates compared to/calibrated with tree rings and varve counts, and so on (Kitagawa and van der Plicht, 1998). All methods make assumptions, including those favored by AiG, the difference being that real scientists actually go out and test their assumptions.

Kitagawa, H., and van der Plicht, J., 1998. Atmospheric Radiocarbon Calibration to 45,000 yr B.P.: Late Glacial Fluctuations and Cosmogenic Isotope Production, Science 279 (5354): 1187- 1190.

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It also makes the assumption that the initial amount of measurements is known.

Is any comment needed here? The initial amount of measurement? WTF? Maybe they mean the initial amount of daughter nuclide? Another indication of AiG's keen understanding of the methods they are critiquing.

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Problems with this is that we know from experimentation the rate DOES change due to weathering.

Weathering does not significantly affect decay rates in any known radiometric dating system.

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Is it easier to get the age of book in a library by looking when it says it was printed or taking a sample from the book and subjecting it to uniformitarian dating?

It sure is. That's why I look for a pub date when I want to date a book. Unfortunately, the earth is not similarly tagged with pub dates.

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An eyewitness account of the Bible is still the best, and most scientific method for arriving at age.

Except that the bible has no eyewitness account of anything that happened for the first 99.999% of earth history. Fortunately, in those cases where radiometric dating dating can be tested against eyewitness historical dates, the agreement is quite good (e.g. Renne et al, 1997), providing yet another example of concordance supporting the validity of radiometric dating techniques.

Renne et al, 1997. 40Ar/39Ar Dating into the Historical Realm: Calibration Against Pliny the Younger. Science 277, pp. 1279-1280.

Roland98 · 05-29-2003, 09:49 AM

Hi all!

AiG, gotta love 'em. I also sent in a question for them awhile ago--after reading their hilarious essay on the "kind species" hypothesis that describes how Noah was able to take all the animals on the ark. Classic.

This was my question (I wasn't so bold in my evolutionist views):

Quote:

I was looking at pictures of the creation museum being built in Kentucky. In these, it looks like you will have figures of mammoths and T. rexes in the Garden of Eden. However, I have read on your site that this type of speciation did not occur until after the flood--thus, these particular species would not exist until later in creation. Can you explain this discrepancy? Thanks.

This was their response:

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Thanks for your email. I appreciate very much the fact that you have been looking at this whole thing through �biblical glasses�, and your comment will be passed on to the illustrators for the museum just to keep us all alert to this issue. However, a few points are worth making.

No speciation till after the Flood. This cannot be dogmatically stated. There must have been substantial speciation post-Flood, but one cannot dogmatically claim that there was NONE pre-Flood. In fact, some such speciation is suggested in the fossil record. We would presume that the original elephantine kind had some of the features that were later concentrated in the woolly mammoth. But I certainly agree that it would be best not to try to represent the woolly mammoth as living in Eden, for instance.
Remember that the original kinds were species. This often confuses people, but the reality is that if they were separate populations that could not interbreed with each other, but could interbreed among themselves, they were by definition separate species. Since some would have been similar to others, one could have classified them to some extent into higher groupings at that point, but then as they split (especially after the Flood), some of the �higher groupings� would indeed arise from common ancestry, not just common design. Let�s call these the �kind species�.
An original kind species, from which further species �budded off� later, may not have itself gone extinct. And/or it may have looked very much like one of its later daughter species. So for instance, let�s assume that there was an original tyrannosaurid species (the original kind-species), which gave rise to all the creatures now classified into the dinosaur "family" Tyrannosauridae, e.g. Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, Tarbosaurus, possibly Aublysodon and Alectrosaurus, and obviously T. rex, etc. What did this original tyrannosaurid species/kind look like? Well, it may have looked much like the T. rex we know so well. In fact, for all we know, the fossil T. rexes we know of might still be the original kind-species which lasted right through to the Flood. Daspletosaurs, etc may have �budded off� beforehand.

So I would have no problem with the Garden of Eden depicting T. rexes much as they are today, especially since we have no evidence of any post-Flood T.rex fossils suggesting that T. rex skeletons are likely to be the �post-speciation-post-Flood� offshoots of the kind that was on the Ark. HOWEVER, I would think that the situation is different for the woolly mammoth. For one thing, we know of this creature from POST-FLOOD fossils. And there are reasons to believe (from mammoth-like features in Nepalese elephants) that today�s elephantids are related to the post-Flood mammoth, and there are other elephantids in the fossil record, so all might have descended from a pre-Flood elephant kind. For all these reasons, I would much prefer NOT to have a woolly mammoth in the Garden of Eden, but rather one of the more generalized extinct elephantids. And when depicting any other kind of creature in the garden or preFlood world, it would be better to aim for a stab at a more generalized type � e.g. some sort of creature looking like a mix between wolf, dog, dingo, etc for the dog kind.

Carl.

I laughed my ass off.

BTW, does Ken Ham look a bit "un-evolved" to anyone else here?

Roland

Mageth · 05-29-2003, 10:42 AM

In fact, some such speciation is suggested in the fossil record.

No shit, Sherlock.

Doubting Didymus · 05-29-2003, 04:09 PM

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it would be better to aim for a stab at a more generalized type � e.g. some sort of creature looking like a mix between wolf, dog, dingo, etc for the dog kind.

... gee. Almosts sounds like an intermediate form.

"How to cover ones arse in the event that the fossil canine common ancestor is brought to our attention", by AiG.

GunnerJ · 05-29-2003, 05:21 PM

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does Ken Ham look a bit "un-evolved" to anyone else here?

Shit, yo, does anyone have the animated gif of him becoming Dr. Zayus?

God Fearing Atheist · 05-29-2003, 05:37 PM

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Originally posted by Roland98
BTW, does Ken Ham look a bit "un-evolved" to anyone else here?

Does Animal Control know that guy is on the loose?

-GFA

Tim · 05-29-2003, 06:40 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Roland98
BTW, does Ken Ham look a bit "un-evolved" to anyone else here?

Naughty, naughty. Plagiarising Bill Hicks like that. Though you're right.

Jimmy Higgins · 05-29-2003, 06:49 PM

Quote:

Question 4: What is the age of the universe?

Bible: From Earth standard time approximately 6 thousand years.

Evolution: 8-24 billion years depending on the latest Hubble constant and distant starlight travel.

How old is this response? Did they write a couple different responses and just send out the appropriate one? The age is 13.7 Billion plus or minus 1 percent.

Wyz_sub10 · 05-30-2003, 07:53 AM

The kind of ignorance or dishonesty (take your pick) displayed by AiG makes me sick to my stomach.

Not a trace of integrity.

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05-29-2003, 10:42 AM	#24
Mageth Contributor Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: Deep in the heart of mother-lovin' Texas Posts: 29,689	In fact, some such speciation is suggested in the fossil record. No shit, Sherlock.

05-30-2003, 07:53 AM	#30
Wyz_sub10 Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: In the land of two boys and no sleep. Posts: 9,890	The kind of ignorance or dishonesty (take your pick) displayed by AiG makes me sick to my stomach. Not a trace of integrity.

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