Valerie, though I do not fully understand your position from your last post, some parts of it sound very encouraging…Like the above I quoted. Do not give away your faith. Think of your children. Think of eternity. Nothing that God has given us in the Scriptures is worth trading the most precious things.
The Torah was given to Moses by God…we believe God actually gave him each character to pen. The Bible revisionists here on this forum do not hold sacred, nor have regard, for these things. Continue your study, but be wise. Everything these people here will tell you is a fable, a made up story-line. You be more cunning than they. Be wiser than they. And you will do well.
On that, you might be interested in Tattersall’s book, The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack. Tattersall thinks that some of the taxa traditionally used, such as Homo erectus, are indeed bad taxa: “wastebasket” groups caused by lumping fossils together in preference to splitting them to reflect the real diversity of ancient human species. He attributes this to, among other things, Ernst Mayr’s view that human ancestry should be expected to be less “bushy” than phylogeny usually is. That said, however, there is no question at all that the various H. erectus fossils are not sapiens, and are well outside of the range of variation within sapiens. Indeed, the problem here is that they are TOO variable to all be the same species, much less the same species as we are.
What you’ll find if you scrutinize evolutionary literature is that sound and thoughtful critique of particular evolutionary views is something that goes on constantly. Science is not an echo chamber. But all critiques are not equally credible, and I think it’s very helpful to look at credible critiques of particular evolutionary hypotheses, and the way they are mounted by true experts in these fields, in order to understand how badly creationist critiques fall short. One nice example is this talk by the paleontologist Christine Janis on “arms races” between predators and prey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnB22A2wEMA
When one understands what real scientific critique looks like, it illuminates the problems with the ersatz critiques that make up creationism.
Really not understanding why the rocks have to be so far apart in age. All I see is one geological formation on top of another. To me that just points to one extreme event after an initial one.
Looking at those lake varves, can you see why we say the earth looks older than 6,000 years? This evidence doesn’t get you to billions of years, but it seems impossible to explain as the result of 6,000 years. Would you agree that this shows the earth at least appears to be greater than 100,000 years old?
They aren’t the sort of rocks that come out of extreme events, for the most part. And they contain clues to their ages, which cover a very long period of time. The rates at which sediments are deposited, the changes in fossil biota throughout the sequence, magnetic reversals, and radiometric dating all agree that it took a very long time.
The geologic formation at Siccar Point is called an angular unconformity. Angular unconformities take at least 7 separate geologic steps to form with each step taking millions of years
Horizontal sediments are laid down on the ocean bed.
As they are buried deeper the sediments lithify - harden into stone
Plate tectonics raises and tilts the once horizontal layers
Erosion planes off the tilted layers to a once again horizontal surface
Another ocean ingresses and lays further sediment over top the planed off tilted area.
The new layers are buried and lithify
Eventually erosion exposes the whole combined sequences.
These sort of formations are impossible to form in a one year one time flood. YECs won’t touch this sort of physical evidence. As mentioned above it was famous angular unconformity at Siccar Point Scotland which convinced geologist James Hutton in 1788 the Earth wasn’t young.
So I accept that carbon dating would be fairly accurate to a certain point.
I read through the varve article and I thought - oh that makes sense, but…
1 - why is it acceptable that the line on the graph is not perfectly straight?
I was just watching this dumb video to learn more https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ERsk_J6gn8 and they mentioned at about 3:00 minutes of the video the 2006 research combined 4 samples - really? There isn’t 1 complete sample? If there’s not an extremely good reason for this, I’m chucking it Otherwise I’m skeptical that’s it’s just “let’s make the data” fit our carbon dating.
Also at about 6 minutes the scientists refers to “using [it] in a conventional way caused significant inaccuracies” what does this mean? lol, I’m still watching the video. I hope this is not a circular argument. Just trying to understand I better watch the rest…
thank you for the example. Still see no reason this poses a threat to a young earth timescale. We’d need time for the new stone be created. How long does the second stone take to be formed?
As I explained before each step in the process take million to tens of millions of years. Ocean sediments which eventually form limestone or sandstone are typically deposited only 10-20 m / million years max. Plate tectonic movements which tilt the layer and expose them to erosion are also very slow, a few mm a year. Then we have to have another sea ingress (more millions of years), another thick layer of sediment deposited (million of years), then more plate tectonic tilting and erosion for the stack to be visible. There’s just no physical way churning flood water can produce such structures in a single year. As a confirmation the tilted layers can often be radiometric dated and show the vast time gap between each layer. In the case of Siccar Point the bottom layer is Silurian graywacke sandstone approx. 435 million years old while the top layer is Devonian sandstone and breccia approx. 375 million years old.
Fun fact - the Bible describes the first steps happening in observable time. https://creation.com/images/pdfs/tj/j12_3/j12_3_312-313.pdf And - if it’s just made up, how would they even make up such a theory of plate tectonics that did such a thing and why would they do so?
I better watch the rest…