Examples of obvious things showing earth is more than 6k y.
Offline I'm doing a lot of work on my g/f, who is a literal, 6000 year old earth believer.
I'm also trying to come up with a list of Captain Obvious Grade items that prove the earth is more than 6000 years old. Please add to the list.
1. The speed of light is well understood and measured. We can look into the sky and see objects far enough away that it would take more than 6000 years for the light to travel to earth...
2. Static on a detuned TV is partially made of cosmic background radiation from the big bang, which also is too far away from earth for the light to get here in less than 6000 years.
I guess apologists could say that you can't *know* how far those objects really are away - how can you prove that they are that far away?
Other Captain Obvious examples? The plainer, more layman, the better.
"Religion is like a badly written contract - most people don't read most (much less all) of it, believe what the other party says, and execute with the best of intentions and naivety."
- Me
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go here for information in how the distance of stars and other phenomena are measured:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec
Radiometric dating is another good way to show the earth is over 6k years old, and most xtians I've talked to about this usually like to nitpick about carbon-14 dating (and of course not know a damn thing about it), and usually fail to realize that there are other forms of radiometric dating used for various time scales.
population models of both humans and animals would probably be another good place to start, not to mention the spread of various cultures across the planet.
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This may be an obvious question - what does she think dinosaur bones are? I mean, does she have an explanation for them?
6000 years isn't very long, is it? Do we know the earth's birthday? It might help to know it's starsign. I reckon it'll be a Libra.
Hmmm, Stone Henge is from around 3100 BC and we're in 2006 so that's 5106 years ago... okay, need something 895 years older than that... http://www.stonehenge.co.uk/history.htm
...how long would it take to walk from the Garden of Eden to Somerset in England? Would they need to invent boats and stuff to sail here? That could take a while. And the packing - getting ready for a trip always takes me at least a day or two. Ah! I have it! we have to let the population build up a bit, don't we!!
NSane
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. ~ Virginia Woolf 1928.
Wow! You are dating someone that believes Earth is 6000 years old? I could date a theist, but not someone that believes that Earth is only 6,000 years old, or that doesn't believe in evolution, or that believes that Noah's great flood is true.
Ice cores. One ice core was taken which has 800,000 layers. Only 1 layer develops every year.
Plate tectonics and other geologic activity. This one isn't as obvious, and it uses fossil evidence and rock formations to prove the movement of Earth's plates over well more than 6,000 years. She can't deny the existance of Volcanos and Earthquakes, but maybe that is just "God's" anger.
How about the Nautilus (Nautilus pompilius). How come that animal looks like pretty much every torsion-shelled, oceanic mollusc from the Cambrian explosion? It still looks like that, it hasn't evolved in over a million years.
Or just look at any alligator (Alligator sp. ), crocodiles (Crocodylus sp.), or pretty much any lizard. I mean: the creationist, 6000 year old earth explains why they all look remarkably similiar to dinosaurs... right?
Or look at deep-sea ecosystems. Many of the organisms down there look completely dissimiliar to any other animal. Maybe because evolution depends on environmental changes and pressures, and if those aren't there, evolution doesn't occur much. In a way this reversely confirms evolution.
Or how about carbon dating on fossils and bones? The amount of carbon-12 left in these tissues is so small that it must have been decaying for more than 6000 years.
Or how about the depth of the Colorado river from the edge of the Grand Canyon. I'd like to see that thing get eroded in just 6000 years.
Or how about the fact that there were Neanderthals?
I'm also dating a theist, but she does accept evolution so I'm good on that front. I couldn't deal with someone that believes the world is only 6000 years old. You're a stronger man than me.
"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are venomous enough, or secret, subterranean and small enough - I call it the one immortal blemish upon the human race." -
Well, the comeback to volcanoes and earthquakes and grand canyon is that before God created humans, there were storms and earthquakes of well, biblcial, proportions.
The ice core samples are a good one though!
The only reason I hang on is because she is a nice person, and her beliefs were basically thrown on her by whacko siblings when she was emotionally hurt. She falls under the "ignorant" category in that she hasn't read the bible all the way through and still listens. There is still hope.
"Religion is like a badly written contract - most people don't read most (much less all) of it, believe what the other party says, and execute with the best of intentions and naivety."
- Me
Well if she is willing to listen we know hope exists
...and there was me thinking that it all happened in a week. Ahh, it was a very long week then... so when does this 6000 years start from then? When Adam and Eve popped up? Nah, if the earth is 6000 years old then biblical storminess or not, the geology still took longer than that.
Good luck with it.
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. ~ Virginia Woolf 1928.
Good, and in the vein of radiometric dating try the Ar-Ar (Argon-Argon) for dating of volcanic excreta- over time the isotopes K-39 and K-40 decay into Ar-39 and Ar-40 at a steady rate; I believe the half-life is 1.55 billion years. So two different but related processes, basically identical results...
You might try (carefully of course) taking her to task on her beliefs and what they're actually based on- in other words, HOW does she "know" that the earth is six thousand years, creation by god, that there IS a god- and why that particular god? etc. etc. Basically, WHERE does all this come from? If you're going to be skeptical about evolution, well okay, but don't give creationism a free pass I say... just a thought, and best of luck! I used to be a creationist too so I know it must be tough for her.
Well, it makes for interesting reading for sure, but the response to questions like that are books from the Intstitute for Creation Research. One is entitled "The Young Earth", and the other "The Answers Book". Both use the usual arguments (e.g. the bible is right because the bible says its right). I particularly love the actual citations that "no transitional forms exist" and "Hitler was an evolutionist". They actually have a diagram showing that without god, the world would be nothing but abortions, pornography and homosexuality. :roll:
I think I might have found another Captain Obvious example with the age of the sun as described here:
http://cosmos.phy.tufts.edu/~zirbel/ast21/handouts/Energy-of-Sun-better.PDF
And, to blow the speed of light could have been different before, evidence from the supernova in 1989 showing that radioactive decay happened exactly at the same rate as is does on earth. Thus, the speed of light must have been constant for at least 170,000 years.
About 2/3rds of the way down on this page (begins with "Supernova 1987A proves the"
:
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/age.htm
Now, you either have to think God is just tricking us just for the hell of it, there is some hitherto unknown mechanism where the speed of light increases dramatically, then slows down, and only in a pattern that makes this supernova appear older/father away, or ? to still hang on to the 6000 year argument.
"Religion is like a badly written contract - most people don't read most (much less all) of it, believe what the other party says, and execute with the best of intentions and naivety."
- Me