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<p>Then dating rocks around a fossils is meaningless in determining the age of the fossil.</p>
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To turn it around, I will presume that evidence given on a religious site is religious, but I won’t assume that evidence given on a scientific site is religious.</p>
<p>“Dismissing claims” (your words) on a religious site is quite different from not assuming them to be scientific. Investigation is indeed required to discover if they are scientific. Please be more careful in your accusations! :)</p>
<p>Wrong. The fossil contains trace amounts of the original creature and also, another thing is that magma is boiling beneath the surface for many years. Not very many fossils are preserved in hardened lava.</p>
<p>Also, there always can be errors in results. Samples can get mixed up tests can be botched. EVERY test cannot be botched though. I hope.</p>
<p>And I really do not know how people that aren’t reading the bible in it’s completely original form (not retranslated) it is IMPOSSIBLE to even know the “word of God” (which I believe it is… the writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit… and another thing is that the churches that believe in everyword literally aren’t even the true church… they broke off from it.)</p>
<p>“Hello i am new to this blog and i am going into college next year and i felt like throwing in my opinion an a matter that was posted a while back. Someone said that he believes in God and overall believes in the bible, but he also believes that God used evolution to create our universe, or at least thats what it sounded like. I would like to say that if you believe in a theistic God, that’s personal in our very lives, and the reason he created us was to have a personal relationship with Him. Then God could not have used evolution to bring about our universe. The main reason is because the evolutionary process takes away that personal relationship that the bible is based upon. If by way of evolutionary creation, we aren’t made in His image, He doesn’t know who we are, redemption isn’t needed, us worshiping Him isn’t necessary, and this world wouldn’t care about death and whatever else happens because it would be in our nature to look out for ourselves. I don’t believe in evolution because i am afraid of it, I don’t believe in it because it doesn’t fit with what I believe about God and what I have seen of God’s creation. I just wanted to say my opinion and if i wasn’t clear on something or if you have questions, then ask away”</p>
<p>No, God is ever present. He is here now, five minutes ago and five minutes ahead. He knew that humanity was going to be one of the results of evolution. The Bible is a book of faith, not science. Whoever wrote Genesis would have been considered insane and what was revealed to him would have been wasted.</p>
<p>//Mt. St. Helens should be a wake-up call that scientists need to refine dating techniques. Not only are rocks being dated incorrectly, but rock layers themselves need to be rethought. Mt. St. Helens laid down up to 400 feet of strata that had been previously thought to take thousands of years. When you see a tree vertically petrified, the entire height of the tree was probably buried in a matter of a few years at most, thus implying rock layers representing a few years, not millions of years.</p>
<p>Note: I am not challenging the “evidence” (the amount of potassium-40 and argon-40 in the sample), I am saying that the “interpretation” of the evidence (based upon unverifiable assumptions) is not indisputable.//</p>
<p>I’ve seen this claim before. For one thing, K-40 isn’t meant to date recent events, it’s half life is too long, which is why it is used to date samples well above a million years old (where it’s, I believe, few hundred thousand to few million margin of error is inconsequential). The particularly study commonly referenced for the above claim was also questionable in other methodology, the samples used had xenocrysts within them, that is older solid rock within the magma, which would produce much older ages than the magma itself. Proper dating would account for xenocrysts, however that was not the case here.</p>
<p>//Radioactive dating works if you know the initial conditions. Some argue that radioactive dating is accurate because readings are “consistent with each other”, but that is a circular argument.//</p>
<p>How is this circular? We have multiple, independent dating methods pointing to the same date.</p>
<p>//The moon is currently moving away from the earth at the rate of 1.5 inches per year – that implies a moon touching the earth as early as 1.5 billion years ago.//</p>
<p>Assuming the rate is constant, I’m getting 95 billion years. (Using perigee at 363,104 km). My math wrong?</p>
<p>//Even the known reversals of the magnetic field have problems.//</p>
<p>Magnetic reversals are derived from seafloor data, with its alternating magnetic chrons parallel to the line of seafloor spreading. And it’s not like the field would be completely absent, though I’m not familiar with the models.</p>
<p>I forget when it is believe the earth was formed… but I believe one of the theories regarding the moon is that it was a part of the earth as it was forming or that it took part in the forming</p>
<p>No it was that the moon smashed into the earth.</p>
<p>Well personally I think in order to take the bible as completely literal, or like a simple guide line to life like the Qur’an it would take a way much of the meaning within the bible. If you took the metaphor of the lord being the shepherd and the people being the lamb as literal then it would no longer make sense. Metaphor is a type of language that helps explain things and helps let people understand within something that we can relate with a greater idea. </p>
<p>I personally don’t think it matters too much whether or not the earth was made in two seconds or two hundred billion years. I personally believe that God guides evolution and that he guides the earth. When the bible says “and then there was light”. That complete start out of nowhere is completely related to the modern views of the big bang and how something was started from nothing. Whether or not scientists realize it they are creating a theory that doesn’t make sense within scientific terms but does within religious. Because within science, nothing can be created or destroyed, and nothing would have sparked out of nothing unless there is some force that it reacted with. But technically speaking some force dragging in overloads of almost infinite energy would not be possible within the bounds of science.</p>
<p>Then if you had a vision deep into the prehistoric times and saw the sea you would see many pterosaurs flying all around and tons of fish, this would make anyone who saw it with limited knowledge say that there were only fish and flighted animals or birds.</p>
<p>Now this isn’t to say that I think that that vision happened, but I am saying that it is entirely possible that God created light, and space and materials, both visible and invisible. Then creating the earth a completely water covered planet, and then putting land, atmosphere and thus sky on the earth, and then the stars in the sky. It is entirely possible that he created the animals afterward and then people. This is entirely possible.</p>
<p>As Jim Schicatano explains on his website, A Day-Age Creation Theory, he says that</p>
<p>"Science has learned that the creation of the universe, and the formation and development of life on planet Earth, was not confined to six 24-hour days. Even the events described on the First Day of Creation spanned the passage of billions of years - from the explosive birth of the universe to the dissipation of the Earth’s primordial atmosphere. Because of this scientific knowledge, it is tempting to dismiss the Biblical account of creation. This rejection primarily centers around one point of contention. After an initial reading of Genesis 1:1 through 2:4, most readers are convinced that the Biblical Creation Days were twenty-four hours.</p>
<p>The word “day” in the Creation Story is the translation of the Hebrew word "yom."4 Like “evening,” “morning,” and virtually every word in the English language, “day” possesses more than one definition. The Hebrew word “yom” is actually similar to the English word “day” in the ways it may be used. It may consist of twenty-four hours, the daylight portion of a day, an era, or a unit of work.</p>
<p>In general, the Hebrew word “yom” represents a period of time, the length of which is determined by its context in the sentence. While it is most often interpreted as a 24-hour day, the word “day” need not be restricted to exactly twenty-four hours. It may be no less than the daylight portion of a day, but it may span many years. While this does not substantiate the passage of millions or billions of years required for scientific corroboration, the flexibility of “yom” does allow us some latitude in our interpretation of the Creation Story.5"</p>
<p>In other words, yom means a period of time, or section of time, which could mean of six stages. This site is actually a pretty good representation of how I feel, [A</a> Day-Age Creation Theory](<a href=“http://home.att.net/~jamspsu84/ttocdayage.html]A”>http://home.att.net/~jamspsu84/ttocdayage.html)</p>
<p>I also think that Genesis is very valid, and has substance. I do believe it sometimes is written in metaphor and sometimes to be better described for people of either that time or forever. But even if God did put something that contradicted man’s ideas of now, I would believe it because humans have been wrong before and they will be wrong again, we only have limited knowledge.</p>
<p>“No it was that the moon smashed into the earth.”</p>
<p>In case anyone cares about the current scientific explanation:
[Moon</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“Moon - Wikipedia”>Moon - Wikipedia)</p>
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<p>Not after 1 million years. All the original creature has been replaced by rock.</p>
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<p>Is a police officer wrong to follow a lead based upon a hunch? No. But, that hunch must be proved by the evidence before the criminal can be convicted in court.</p>
<p>The science behind dating techniques is sound. In many long-age instances, since you don’t know the reasonableness of the assumptions, you don’t know the reasonableness of the results. Thus, the hunch (assumptions) must be proved.</p>
<p>The typical circular reasoning with dating is: Rock layers are dated by the types of fossils found it in, and the age of the fossils are dated by the rock layer they are found it. So where is the independent date?</p>
<p>Radioactive dating of the rock layer has been proposed as a means to give an independent date to the rock layer.</p>
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<p>If you don’t know how old the rock layer is, how do you know whether it is, or is not, a “recent event”, and thus K-40 dating does not apply?</p>
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<p>So, why didn’t the lab take it into account? Are all datings from that lab now suspect?</p>
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<p>At this point, radioactive dating is the only “independent” means of dating a rock. The other “multiple methods” are the circular reasoning described above. While you can make reasonable assumptions about the conditions 100 million years ago, the Mt. St. Helens example shows that there is not one set of assumptions you can use to date a random rock. Thus, you must know something about the rock, make a guess about the rock, and then use the radioactive dating to date the rock based upon your guess. Thus, your guess affects the results, and thus the results are not truly independent. Make a different guess, and you end up with a different age.</p>
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<p>You are off by a factor of 10. Distance between the Earth and Moon is 363,104 km, or 3.63 x 10^8 meters. The moon is receding around 3.8 cm per year, or 3.8 x 10^-2 meters. 3.6/3.8 is roughly 1. 10^8/10^-2 is 10^10, or 10 billion, not 100 billion.</p>
<p>However, the moon does not recede at a constant rate. Just like when you throw a ball up in the air, the velocity slows over time. So, 10 billion years is the outside. If you take into account the slowing, then you get to around 1.5 billion years.</p>
<p>If anyone is looking for a good book about reconciling the evangelical faith with a belief in evolution, I recommend Karl Giberson’s Saving Darwin. Excellent read and commentary on the history of science and evangelical and fundamentalists response to it.</p>
<p>Another good one is “Darwin, His Daughter, and Human Evolution” by Darwin’s great-great-grandson Randal Keynes, which was recently reissued as “Creation” to match the movie title. It tells how Darwin remained a believer, though he split with the church which rejected his theory. Darwin wanted nothing to do with atheists who used his theory to bolster their opinions.</p>