If man evolved?

by tornapart 427 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  rawe

  Hi Cofty,

  "Some young-Earth proponents recently reported that rocks were dated by the potassium-argon method to be a several million years old when they are really only a few years old. But the potassium-argon method, with its long half-life, was never intended to date rocks only 25 years old." There is of course a basic question in all this. That is do we understand radiation well enough to draw conclusions? And is radiation a stable sort of thing? I appreciate this comment isn't a reference to carbon dating, but the same principal applies. That is carbon-14 will decay, whereas carbon-12 is much more stable, thus a ratio between the two is inevitable and the ratio will change over time.

  Can our understanding of all this be so flawed that wild range errors will creep into all dating methods? I just don't think that is very likely. I'm a software engineer by trade and I know that understanding how phyiscal systems work, including precise timing, is key to how a computer operates. Likewise a microwave over shows that something is known about physical systems involving radiation work. Solar panels likewise and the list goes on and on. So when someone asks us to believe rocks at Mt. St. Helens were dated incorrectly and that shows our potassium-argon dating methods are flawed, should we not at least ask, is there some religious motivation in play here?

  I do believe, some of this comes down to a question of trust. And I am not a radiometric dating expert, so I have to trust someone. But even I can reach a conclusion something is fishy when someone with a religious bias starts asking for a sample of only a few years age to be dated with a method where the half life is 1.2 million years! It is like asking someone to measure the distance between features on a modern CPU with a yard stick, then declaring the yard stick is useless to measure the width of my living room.

  Cheers,

  -Randy
• 

  cofty

  should we not at least ask, is there some religious motivation in play here? - Rawe

  People like James have a lot invested in their fundamentalist religious dogma. Admitting error is as painful as it is for a JW to admit they have been following a cult.

  I think this quote says it all...

  I'll go with God and the Bible, you go with atheism and evolution. - James Brown

  Which when translated means, "I will stick with my precious dogma and don't upset me with your goddamned facts."

  I think discussions like this are valuable to the many people who are more open-minded and may be exposed to this sort of issue for the first time. When I left the borg, and for the following 9 years as a christian I knew nothing about the fact of evolution. Like James I thought I knew a lot about the subject based on the writings of ignorant fools with a religious agenda.

  I remember the first time I borrowed a book from the library called something like "Evolution Made Easy" I was astonished at my ignorance.

  Cantleave's Common Ancestry thread is not to be missed...
• 

  cantleave

  That is do we understand radiation well enough to draw conclusions? And is radiation a stable sort of thing?

  Yes and Yes (well obviously radiation is due to atomic instability, but we understand the process well enough to ascertain the half-lives of different radiactive species).
• 

  Heaven

  cofty, I do hope James does the reading you've recommended. I hope it can open his mind.

  I remember the first time I borrowed a book from the library called something like "Evolution Made Easy" I was astonished at my ignorance.

  It has been a long time since I was in high school. I feel there are certain subjects in Science in school that need to be mandatory. I did not learn about evolution because I did not take Biology (I'm pretty sure that was the class where evolution was taught). I did not like the Biology teacher. That year I dropped down to the regular Science stream instead of the advanced stream and took General Science (I'm pretty sure this was in grade 10). I did very well in that class and I think it was the reason I won the Science award for grades 9 and 10. They changed the rules the following year for winning that award.

  I appreciate everyone's posts here on JWN that contain information on Science. I won an award for Science in high school and you guys know far more about it than I do.

  I plan to begin reading your recommendations, cofty. Thank you very much for your time, efforts, and patience with those of us who are not as advanced as you and specifically for those who are fundamentalist believers.
• 

  Cadellin

  Thanks for the link to Wien's excellent article. I read it years ago when I was first learning TTATT and it was all so painful and shocking--how much I didn't know, how badly I'd been misled by the WT's abominable pseudo-science writing. It's so much easier to look away, to avoid reading credible information and to simply continue on believing comfy falsehoods.
• 

  rawe

  Hi Cofty,

  'Which when translated means, "I will stick with my precious dogma and don't upset me with your goddamned facts."' The point I was making in post was I found that as a Witness I did trust scientific understanding and many ways. I knew medications used on humans had been tested on animals. I knew cancer researchers used mice. In both cases the theory of evolution was at play, since the common ancestor between mice and humans allowed such research to reach reliable conclusions. Likewise I had no reason not trust quartz crystal ocsillator made a digital watch a great time piece. Or that packets of data could be modulated over a radio waves to make cell phones work. So it was, that I found myself more and more in the camp of "I will go with scientific understanding 99.9% of the time, but hold contrary views, even in closely related areas, solely because such upsets my Biblical view of the world."

  I think as Witnesses the break away from this, can if looked at correctly, be easier. Because modern Witnesses accept dating for the age of elephants and the earth, but do special pleading only in the case of humans. Thus it became obvious to me I was being extremely selective and sometimes willfully ignorant, of what I was accepting as scientific knowledge and what I was rejecting.

  Cheers,

  -Randy

  ps. Very much enjoyed this thread -- thanks to everyone for posting!
• 

  jgnat

  Radioactive decay explained:

  The rates of decay of various radioactive isotopes have been accurately measured in the laboratory and have been shown to be constant, even in extreme temperatures and pressures. These rates are usually expressed as the isotope's half-life--that is, the time it takes for one-half of the parent isotopes to decay. After one half-life, 50 percent of the original parents remains; after two, only 25 percent remains, and so on.

  http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Extension/geotopics/earth_age.html

  
• 

  cofty

  Randy - I think science has the potential to break the spell for a lot of JWs.

  We can exchange proof texts with them about the trinity or the great crowd until doomsday. When it comes to science they are 100% clueless and we have a stunning amount of resources to work with. They might not look at "apostate" websites but they may accept the challenge of looking at science pages.
• 

  James Brown

  14. A young-Earth research group reported that they sent a rock erupted in 1980 from Mount Saint Helens volcano to a dating lab and got back a potassium-argon age of several million years. This shows we should not trust radiometric dating.

  There are indeed ways to "trick" radiometric dating if a single dating method is improperly used on a sample. Anyone can move the hands on a clock and get the wrong time. Likewise, people actively looking for incorrect radiometric dates can in fact get them. Geologists have known for over forty years that the potassium-argon method cannot be used on rocks only twenty to thirty years old. Publicizing this incorrect age as a completely new finding was inappropriate. The reasons are discussed in the Potassium-Argon Dating section above. Be assured that multiple dating methods used together on igneous rocks are almost always correct unless the sample is too difficult to date due to factors such as metamorphism or a large fraction of xenoliths.

  Some young-Earth proponents recently reported that rocks were dated by the potassium-argon method to be a several million years old when they are really only a few years old. But the potassium-argon method, with its long half-life, was never intended to date rocks only 25 years old. These people have only succeeded in correctly showing that one can fool a single radiometric dating method when one uses it improperly. The false radiometric ages of several million years are due to parentless argon, as described here, and first reported in the literature some fifty years ago. Note that it would be extremely unlikely for another dating method to agree on these bogus ages. Getting agreement between more than one dating method is a recommended practice.

  No one is trying to trick anyone. They are trying to show you that your methods don't work.

  The circular reasoning I am talking about is rocks can not accurately be dated.

  You have to go by false information to calibrate your figures. You are going by the strata where you find the rocks to assume

  their age. That is circular reasoning. You are assuming the age of the strata therefore concluding the age

  of the rock.

  If you cant date rock without assuming its age which is circular reasoning, you cant date a rock.

  You cant assume the earth is 4.5 billions of years old based on a house of cards one assumption

  placed upon another.

  I take that back, If you don't believe in God or the bible you can assume anything you want.

  But that doesn't make it right. They are just a lot of assumptions.

  Which is what I am trying to point out.

  You cant look at a partly lit candle and know with certainty how long ago it was lit.

  How many times it was lit. How long or big it was before it was lit.

  That is analogous to what you are trying to do dating the earth.

  It's hocus pocus. People who live off tax payers dollars in the education system

  trying to confuse the masses with their

  mumbo jumbo. So they can keep getting a tax payer paycheck.

  It's like the tv show the big bang theory a bunch of educated nerds that are clueless and don't

  know how stupid they are.
• 

  jgnat

  Lessee; 20 videos each, say, two hours long. That's forty hours a fool can't get back. I've only had the "pleasure" of seeing two.