Is it possible to “rationally believe” that the square root of 203125983025 is 450685?
As it happens, that is not the correct square root.
But is it possible to rationally believe that it is correct?
I have no idea how to answer that question, and fail to see why it is even an important or interesting question.
Same for yours.
No, I don’t. I think such belief is emotionally grounded. One of the reasons I think that is the existence of many religions, all different, and each with their own fundamental truth premise. If there was a rational way to pick the right one from the wrong ones it would have been done by now. After all, no new data has been forthcoming for a long time. A Muslim picks the Qu’ran, a Christian picks the Bible. Both are convinced that their book is the Word of God. Rational arguments for or against will fail here.
They believe it, sure.
Do they do so “rationally”?
Sure… in this context, they do. This is why we need to replace one inadequate word (i.e., “rational”)… with a set of more specific words.
This is why the Eskimo need a dozen words for our word “snow”!
We all have to deal with relatives…
If I may add some qualification.
If we say a car doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean every part of the car is not working, nor does it mean the car can’t be fixed.
YEC models don’t fully work, yet.
On the other side of the issue, neither does abiogenesis, evolutionary theory, old fossil record, solar system evolution, Big Bang work either. They’ve got problems and are getting worse as time goes on.
Over the last 100 years, the trend has been favorable to the improvement of YEC as more data has come in. I used to believe in abiogenesis, evoution, old fossil record, Big Bang. I no longer do, and I can’t say in good conscience they are credible theories, especially abiogenesis.
The data we have in hand today isn’t necessarily representative of reality. What we know now isn’t what we knew 100 years ago, and abiogenesis and evolutionary theories have failed as theories in the process and Solar System evolution, the Big Bang, the old fossil record claims are now seen to have serious anomalies.
I’ve said the YEC models don’t work yet, but neither the opposing models either! Both views have problems but the trend of discoveries is favorable to YEC/YCC. One can say, “we don’t know, but we have faith our viewpoint is correct.” In fact that is applicable to both sides of this debate, except I’m willing to admit the role of faith in my views, whereas my opponents here pretend they actually have confirmed facts when they actually don’t.
YEC models don’t work at all. They’re contradicted and falsified by the consilience of evidence from virtually every scientific field. But do keep telling us how YEC is winning Baghdad Sal. 
Frankly, this is delusional. You really know next to nothing about geology, but you still pontificate.
Over the last 100 years, mainstream Earth Science has made enormous progress, fuelled by advances in field mapping, microscopic analysis, geochemistry, geophysics, paleontology, computer modelling and more distant fields such as nuclear physics and astronomy. As more and more data has come in, YEC has been exposed more and more as a concept that is entirely detached from reality. In fact, Earth Sciences have falsified YEC for about 200 years now.
Fact is, there are no empirical data whatsoever that indicate that the Earth is only a few thousands year old. All that YEC does is try to poke holes in mainstream models and focus on the noisy datapoints that are inevitable in any natural science. They have nothing positive in support of their own hypothesis. Whenever they try to support the idea it reguires ignorance of mountains of data (often literally), piles of ad-hoccery and unobserved variables.
What is really going on is that YEC tries (quite unsuccessfully) to force-fit the data into an a-priori conclusion that they arrived at via non-scientific means. The last thing they do is follow the data where it leads. You couldn’t get less scientific if you tried.
We can only hope that one day you will realise that you have been taken in by a cult.
Sal’s main tactic now seems to be false equivalence. And he’s unwilling to examine the actual “trend of discoveries”. He’s now qualified his prior admission that YEC models don’t work by adding two weasel words: “yet” and “fully”. All these are tactics of desperation.
I feel the same about your viewpoints.
There is a difference: I have read YEC Earth Science articles and papers with my decent background understanding in Earth Sciences. You have read them with no such background.
This needs to be established. How false is the equivalence. Both are incomplete explanations.
True, and I respect your views. But you could be wrong, and the reason I say that is you’ve not solved the anomalies I’ve put on the table!
They will never fully work.
No scientific model fully works. Reality is more complex than any model.
That’s not right.
Science is forever improving its models. But, of course, as it improves them, it also looks more closely at how well they fit. So we begin to see previously unknown shortcomings of the improved model. But that’s very different from saying that the models are getting worse.
By contrast, the YEC model is relatively static. So it cannot continue get better, because it is tied to a particular reading of Genesis.
What is not static is our understanding of biology.
We know part part of Genesis is symbolic ie the story of God talking to the serpent. There is room here for movement as in my opinion the Bible moving from symbolism to history can be better understood by science. I don’t know @stcordova view on this but this may add some flexibility to the model.
I think the power position is ID at this point as it establishes what is needed for a true integrated worldview such as the one held by such titans as Aquinas, Newton and Maxwell.
See, what you are doing is pointing at the noise instead of looking at the signal. The problems you flag are not fatal, because we can readily identify possible causes for the mismatches even if we don’t have all the details in place. You have already been told that the C14 measurements in diamond are meaningless because they are less than the laboratory blank. Will you now drop that ‘problem’?
On the other hand, you are simply ignoring the signal present in thousands of statistically strongly correlated datings. You have no idea of how the datapoints could possibly still line up if the model asumptions would be wrong.
Let me tell you this: accelerated nuclear decay will not help you, because (apart from all other considerations, such as compete lack of empirical evidence for such variations existing in the conditions where rocks are formed) the variations would have to be exactly fine-tuned with each individual analysis to still make the data points line up.
Remember, in your YEC model the data in an isochrone plot ought to pretty much still fall on the original horizontal line (there won’t be isotope differentiation at the scale of crystallisation of a hand-sized sample, and in 6000 years the isochron would barely rotate away from the horizontal).
A uniform accelerated decay across the globe would make all lines rotate by the same amount, because they are all equally old. So, every isochrone we find anywhere should be at the same angle. Yet, in reality we see isochrones at all angles corresponding to ages across 6 orders of magnitude, depending on which rocks we sample. So, the decay would have to vary from place to place by 6 orders of magnitude, but the variation would also have to be slow enough that samples from associated nearby rock units would still show the same angle (remember the French granite? Isochrons with the same angle from associated samples several kilometers apart).
Yet, when we then sample nearby but geologically different rock suites that, according to us, are of markedly different ages, all of a sudden the decay rate acceleration would have to be markedly different there, so that their isochron comes in at the different angle that we see. In other words, the decay rate acceleration would have to show a strong correlation with rock type.
Tell me, how do Rb atoms know in what type of rock they are incorporated, so that they can finetune their decay so as to a) still fall on a straight line, but b) at the same time fall on a different straight line than the Rb atoms in a nearby but different rock type?
This does not make any sense.
It is actually even worse. The decay rates of different decays systems would have to vary in such a way that their isochrones would still overlie each other (as they often do). How do U atoms know at what rate to decay so that their isochrone ends up at the same angle as the isochron of nearby Rb atoms in the same sample?
On top of all this, all of these thousands of necessary extremely finetuned decay rate variations for which there is precisely zero evidence, you are also facing the unfortunate truth that all of that radiation in such a short time would kill of whoever was unfortunate enough to be around at the time.
You are taking refuge in some sort of “if my model is not free of problems, then neither are opposing models” false equivalence. The YEC model not only has problems, it is completely free of geological
and astronomical support, that is the difference.
YEC is so steeped in the tradition of poking holes in the mainstream narrative as constituting positive evidence for creationism, that they seem to fail to consider what the actual predictive picture should look like were that actually correct. Given their interpretation that the earth is only about six thousand years old and a global flood occurred forty five hundred years ago, what would we expect to find? Then if you find it, you have your evidence. So what should the earth and sky look like were it indeed six thousand year old, without superfluous clutter?
Well, we would expect to see nothing further in space than light could travel over that time, so nothing beyond the crab nebula, and certainly no other galaxies, would be visible. No organic artifact would ever be carbon dated past six thousand years. Other dating methods targeted to longer spans would scarcely show any age at all. Apart from a possible few extinctions, we would expect to find only fossils and remains of plant and animal life familiar from Bible times to today. Any depositions from annual cycles such as tree ring chronologies, ice cap cores, ocean bed sediments, and coral reefs would not extend before the flood or creation. Impact creators would be limited. Sedimentary formations would be shallow. There would be no fossil fuels or thick limestone deposits.
Obviously, YEC presuppositional apologetics here fails massively in terms of predictive validation. Yet YEC organizations continue to use it to predicate most of their arguments with “we know this cannot be older than six thousand years…” and faithfully conclude that “the evidence actually supports a young earth”. Given the overwhelming burden of evidence interlocking all disciplines of science in favor of an old earth, a counter-argument can only be built with extraordinary misrepresentations and selective omissions of information.
Case in point. Here is a picture. Tell me what you see with your very own eyes.
