Tricia

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

~Tricia

(That scream was for all I have to read tonite.)

{RA: Edited scream for length}

My bad.

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: RufusAtticus ]

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: Tricia ]</p>

pescifish

Tricia, that really screws up all the screens when you post so many characters in one unbreakable word.

Daggah

Creationism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. To be a creationist requires dishonesty, so pesky little things like facts and evidence are hardly a problem for creationists.

That's only because you've the misfortune of attending a Christian school and being surrounded by fundie nutcases, Tricia.

hezekiah jones

For the love of god get an astronomy textbook.

RufusAtticus

Tricia,

When you get a chance, you might want to check out some of the papers on this site.

<a href="http://www.asa3.org" target="_blank">American Scientific Affiliation</a>

From the few things I read, it seems to offer a descent presentation of science.

The problem with II, IMO, is that there are no active posters who are evolutionists and Christians. (Deb is the only one I can recall right now, but she only has enough time to respond to certain topics.) This just reinforces your opinion that one can't be Christian and accept evolution.

Here's some comments made by a Christian from another forum.

~~RvFvS~~

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: RufusAtticus ]</p>

Undercurrent

Do you know how if you're watching a car race on tv, as the car goes past the camera the sound it makes starts out high in pitch, drops in pitch as the car goes past, and is lower as the car moves past the camera? To the driver of the car, the car is always making the same noise, but because of the car's motion reletive to the camera, the sound the camera hears changes. A bit higher as the car is coming towards it, and a bit lower as it moves away.

The red shift is the same effect, only with light. If an object is moving away from you quickly the spectrum of light it emits is shifted to the low-frequency (red) end of the spectrum, and it it is moving towards you, it is shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum.

It was the first observational evidence of the expansion of the universe (by Edwin Hubble) that damn near every galaxy in the universe has a detectable red shift. The big bang theory followed shortly thereafter.

Short answer. It's not true. The sun is not appreciably shrinking, and the rate of mass loss by the sun due to fusion is well consistent with a multi-billion year existence (and in fact, in the standard solar model, most of the mass of the sun will never undergo fusion and will still be present when the sun goes nova.

Another short answer. No. The efficacy of radiocarbon dating is in no way related to any estimate of the age of the earth, good or bad. In fact, radiocarbon dating has never been used to attempt to date the earth, for the simple reason that after a few hundred thousand years, most carbon-bearing objects of a mass that we would like to date run out of carbon-14 (and that most objects that date to around the formation of the earth don't contain any carbon, anyway.)

Now, there are forms of radiometric dating that can be used to date much older things, including, for some, the oldest rocks on earth. For example, Uranium-Lead dating, Potassium-Argon dating, Rhubidium-Strontium dating, &c.

You'll find that a lot of creationist literature refers to all radiometric dating methods as "radiocarbon dating". This is just another example of the poor level of creationist scolarship.

Perusing through this thread, I don't see anywhere where anyone has pointed you to the <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org" target="_blank">Talk.Origins archive</a>. That's a site with good, detailed, but acessible to a non-scientist, material on radiometric dating, the Hubble shift, and direct refutation of the more common creationist arguments, like the oft repeated but never justified by data, "The sun is shrinking" schtick.

m.

hezekiah jones

Five million tons of what? Who tells you this stuff?

The sun loses between a tenth of a trillionth and a hundredth of a trillionth of its mass per year (i.e., hardly anything). In the meantime the sun also gains a small amount of mass from comets, dust accretion, and so on.

Based on this fact the incredible shrinking sun's gravitational force has caused the earth's orbit to increase in radius by a relatively negligible degree - about three times the earth's diameter in nearly five billion years.

"Dr." Hovind needn't worry that the sun is going to shrink to the size of his brain in a few thousand years.

Please get an astronomy textbook. How can you possibly understand what these people are trying to explain to you.

[ May 11, 2002: Message edited by: hezekiahjones ]</p>

KeithHarwood

Basically, there aren't any scientists who are creationists. Most of those creationsists who claim to be scientists don't do any science, they just do quote-mining trying to make evolution look bad. The odd few who try to be both give up one or the other in pretty short order. The remainder put up with the cognitive dissonance. A recent thread in this forum described one such person as being near suicide. The vast majority of Christians aren't creationists, so they have no problems.

Not very likely. I've seen lots of things that were unknown become known, I've had cherished ideas overthrown and replaced by better. One more isn't going to make much difference to me. If the evidence for that Something is as good or better than, say, the evidence for virtual particles I'll have to accept it.

You have quite a few mutations which are rare in the human gene pool. If you have just enough children to replace yourself their frequency won't change. If you have more, their frequency will increase, if fewer, their frequency will decrease. Either way matters.

I think so. All the major Christian churches have accepted evolution and the scientific descriptions of the universe. That's Catholic, all the Orthodox churches, Anglican (I think that's called Episcopalian in the US), all the main-stream Protestant churches. If you decide that these aren't True Christians then you reduce Christianity from one of the major religions of the world to a minor cult behind the Moonies.

I have never met a Christian who didn't believe that and I would have to work hard to find one. (I'd probably have to go to Queensland.)

Some scientists today and many in the past dedicated their work to God. Gregor Mendel, who discover the genetics that modern evolutionary theory is based on, was a monk. Georges Lemaitre, who proposed the theory we now call the Big Bang, was a priest. Many of the geologists who determined the age of the earth were Jesuits. The universe they discovered was far more splendid than that depicted in Genesis. Therefore, the god they worshipped was far more splendid than that depicted in Genesis.

The sun has a mass of about 2.2x10^27 tons. At 4 (not 5) million tons per second, that's 1.3x10^14 tons per year. If it keeps it up at the same rate that's 1.7x10^13 years, or 17,000,000,000,000 years. That's over three thousand times as long as it has lasted so far. 4 million tons per second is a drop in the ocean. Or to put it another way, if the sun had been shining at its present rate for the last 5,000,000,000 years it would have lost 0.0003 of its mass.

There is a good description of radioactive dating, written from a Christian perspective, in another thread. In summary, radiocarbon dating is only good for animal or plant material which is less than 100,000 years old. Other dating mathods are accurate over far longer intervals and work on rocks. Some are capable of dating rocks over 100,000,000,000 years old. No such rocks have been found. The dates of rocks that are found are accurate within a couple of a percent. It's these dating methods which tell us how old the earth is, not the other way around.

Edited for a few typos and add a couple of sentences.

[ May 12, 2002: Message edited by: KeithHarwood ]</p>

Tricia

get a grip, I've heard the creationist view, I want to hear the evolutionist's.

Why come in here at all if all you do is criticize me?

~Tricia

hezekiah jones

Red shifts have absolutely nothing to do with evolution. They have to do with physics and astronomy. Evolution has to do with biology.

I don't know. Maybe because you have a history of enjoying it and responding in a delightfully amusing fashion.

I didn't realize that suggesting you get an introductory astronomy textbook in order to facilitate your understanding of a few basic principles was considered criticism. You learn something new every day.

Have some more criticism:

<a href="http://particleadventure.org/particleadventure/" target="_blank">The Particle Adventure</a>