How Good Are Those Young-Earth Arguments?

by hawkaw 18 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  hawkaw

  I am not sure if Alan F. or others have posted this but the following is from Talk Origins.
  

  I thought some of you may find the following interesting with respect to Young-Earth Creationist arguments:

  http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood.html

  In the above link, David Matson takes you through the following (feel free to click on one or all of the following and read):

  Specific Young-Earth Arguments

  It only takes one proof Shrinking sun Accumulation of cosmic dust The existence of short period comets No fossil meteorites Lunar recession Moon contains U-236 and Th-230 Poynting-Robertson effect on space dust Star cluster expansion Saturn's rings Cooling rates of Jupiter and Saturn Decay of Earth's magnetic field Volume of lava on Earth Mineral in ocean water Helium in Earth's atmophere Erosion of Earth's continents

  Thickness of topsoil Erosion of Niagara Falls Oil and gas well pressure Mississippi River delta Slowing of Earth's rotation sediment transport Stalactite formation rates Sahara Desert Amount of salt in the oceans Number of people on Earth Oldest coral reef Oldest tree Oldest historical record Dates in the Bible Stories from ancient cultures

  • Hovind attacks radiocarbon dating

    Atmospheric Carbon-14 equilibrium Carbon-14 decay rate Initial carbon-14 unknown

    System might not be closed Carbon-14 accurately measured Curve based on too few measurements

  • Hovind attacks the geologic column

    Calibration with carbon-14 Geologic column assumes evolution Column invented to discredit Bible and does not exit

    Polystrate fossils and missing/out-of-order layers Choice of method determines age

  • Some additional topics examined

    Woodmorappe's collection of bad dates Water and vapor and Noah's flood Coal and oil

    Mammoths: were they quick-frozen? A couple of ice age problems The distance to Supernova SN1987A and the speed of light

  • Miscellaneous topics

    If the universe is young don't bother with evolution FROGS+TIME = PRINCE Structures cannot evolve by chance Evolution is merely a theory Evolution is a religion

    Only one proof needed for young-earth Each proof is described in detail Evolutionist typically try to debunk only one argument Burden of proof on evolutionists

  Take care

  hawk
• 

  hawkaw

  "Here is elegant proof that the earth is old!

  (Dalrymple, 1991, p.377) - Nuclides currently produced by natural processes are tagged with a "P"

  Nuclide	Half-life (years)	Found in nature?
  V-50	6 x 10 15	Yes
  Nd-144	2.4 x 10 15	Yes
  Hf-174	2.0 x 10 15	Yes
  Pt-192	1 x 10 15	Yes
  In-115	6 x 10 14	Yes
  Gd-152	1.1 x 10 14	Yes
  Te-123	1.2 x 10 13	Yes
  Pt-190	6.9 x 10 11	Yes
  La-138	1.12 x 10 11	Yes
  Sm-147	1.06 x 10 11	Yes
  Rb-87	4.88 x 10 10	Yes
  Re-187	4.3 x 10 10	Yes
  Lu-176	3.5 x 10 10	Yes
  Th-232	1.40 x 10 10	Yes
  U-238	4.47 x 10 9	Yes
  K-40	1.25 x 10 9	Yes
  U-235	7.04 x 10 8	Yes
  Pu-244	8.2 x 10 7	Yes
  Sm-146	7 x 10 7	No
  Pb-205	3.0 x 10 7	No
  U-236	2.39 x 10 7	Yes-P
  I-129	1.7 x 10 7	Yes-P
  Cm-247	1.6 x 10 7	No
  Hf-182	9 x 10 6	No
  Pd-107	7 x 10 6	No
  Mn-53	3.7 x 10 6	Yes-P
  Cs-135	3.0 x 10 6	No
  Tc-97	2.6 x 10 6	No
  Np-237	2.14 x 10 6	Yes-P
  Gd-150	2.1 x 10 6	No
  Be-10	1.6 x 10 6	Yes-P
  Zr-93	1.5 x 10 6	No
  Tc-98	1.5 x 10 6	No
  Dy-154	1 x 10 6	No

  Look again at the table above. Notice how every single nuclide with a half-life greater than 80 million years is found in nature; every single nuclide with a half-life less than 80 million years is not found in nature unless it is currently being produced by nature. Does that tell you something?

  You're looking at prime evidence in favor of an old Earth! Those radioactive nuclides with half-lives below a certain value have, in the turning of the ages, decayed away to nothing. The only survivors are those which can be created by nature.

  Could this be a chance arrangement? Not likely. The odds against being able to draw a line anywhere which divides the nuclides in the above table so that all the nuclides above that line are found in nature by chance while all those below are not, is 536 million to one! (To be fair, we don't count those nuclides that nature can create.) Actually, in testing for a 10,000 year-old Earth, we should extend the table downwards to include nuclides with a half-life of 1000 years or more. They should all be present if the earth is only 10,000 years old. If you do extend the table, you will find that none of those nuclides, save those made by natural processes, are found in nature. The odds (based on an eligible list of 56 nuclides) against that are 72 quadrillion to one! Any takers?"
• 

  IP_SEC

  Yes the earth is only about 32 years old. Thats when I was born and it's all a figment of my imagination. The only reason the 1/2 lifes you mentioned exist is because I just read what you said and they because part of the universe retroactivley.

  Sorry, just kiddin man.

  The earth is old, old, old.
• 

  seven006

  hawkaw,

  I just love the few egg heads we have on this board. Where in the hell were all you guys when I needed someone around to copy off their science homework in high school? Screw offs like me need you guys and are damn glad you stayed home and studied while the rest of us snuck off to parties and pretended to get drunk off of two beers and a half glass of Boons Farm Strawberry Hill wine. I talked to Alan on the phone a week or so ago. I asked him a few earth science questions just to make him feel all tingly inside. You guys complete me.

  BTW, great chart design.

  Dave
• 

  hawkaw

  Thank you for your kind words.

  Just for clarity I did not make the chart or the above-noted essay. I thought I put a quotation around everything from the first word to the last but maybe it is hard to detect.

  You will see the above-noted words and chart in the reference #6 - The Moon contains considerable quantities of U-236 and Th-230 , both of which are short-lived isotopes that would have expired long ago if the Moon were 4.5 billion years old in the above URL.

  I put this information in a separate post to try and get some interest in the science that is out there for all of you to see.

  Take care

  hawk
• 

  Bryan

  Does this topic also cover Young/Old humans?

  __________________________________

  Feb. 17, 2005 ? Modern humans appeared at least 35,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a redating of bones unearthed in Ethiopia in 1967.

  Discovered along the Omo River in Ethiopia, by paleontologist Richard Leakey, the fossils, called Omo I and Omo II, were originally assigned a tentative age of 130,000 years.

  http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20050214/oldesthuman.html?ct=6532.86705332906

  Bryan

  Have You Seen My Mother
• 

  IP_SEC

  So is the current theory that the moon was formed at the same time as earth? I thought it is ejectia from a huge impact in the not too distant past?
• 

  hawkaw

  Here is another one ...

  hawk

  "Young-earth "proof" #19: The size of the Mississippi River delta divided by the sediment accumulation rate gives an age of less than 30,000 years.

  19. Since when does the age of the earth have anything to do with the Mississippi delta? If the Mississippi delta is, in fact, 30,000 years old, what of it?

  Because of oil exploration, geologists know that the sediment in regions around the Mississippi River delta is 7 miles thick! (Hayward, 1985, p.83). Did you ever wonder how Noah's flood, which was quite shallow according to Dr. Hovind, perhaps less than a quarter of a mile deep, managed to stack up 7 miles of sediment?

  It is stretching the long arm of coincidence much too far, to suggest that there just happened to be a vast hole in the ocean bed seven miles deep near the mouth of the Mississippi, and that the Flood just happened to fill that hole with sediment, while leaving nearby areas of the Atlantic unfilled; and that similar coincidences just happened to occur around the mouths of all the world's great rivers.

  (Hayward, 1985, p.84)

  There is no quick way to get that 7 miles of sediment. It takes time for the earth to sink under a load. Suppose you went down to the Gulf of Mexico one fine day, say just off the Texas coast, and dumped a pile of sediment there 7 miles high! I haven't the foggiest idea how long that mountain of sediment would sit there before sinking down to sea level, but I can assure you that it would not disappear overnight. Parts of that heap would probably still be there centuries later.

  A super-charged Mississippi River isn't even going to build mountains of sediment to begin with. The onrushing, sediment-loaded water would just be pushed further into the gulf. You would get a "delta" vastly more spread out than the one we have -- and nowhere near 7 miles thick. Think about it."
• 

  M.J.

  This whole subject is kind of a new one on me. But I can't bury my head in the sand (sediment?) and claim I'm better than the dubs I guess. One thing I found interesting is when I toured a certain cave, formations in there were said to have been growing for many hundreds of thousands of years based on their size and rate of growth.
• 

  stevenyc

  Hawk

  The size of the Mississippi River delta divided by the sediment accumulation rate gives an age of less than 30,000 years.

  I thought the flood was later than that!!!

  Steve.