Not too likely. His prayers all go along the lines of "God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this proloy here." The people who get left out of them are generally happy about it. You might want to include him in yours, though.

It's hard to imagine how Last Rites could be regarded as a "Sign of Faith" even under the old thinking. After all, all those other sacraments are things that you choose to receive. Your having made the choice to receive them is taken as evidence of your faith (I guess they're discounting the possibility that anyone might receive them for any other reason. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition). But that reasoning doesn't hold in the case of Last Rites. People don't choose to receive that sacrament. A person who chose to have it might not get it, and someone who doesn't choose it might get it anyway.

And why was it so important for your community to see such evidence in the first place? That might have an effect on whether the deceased has a statue erected to him, but even in the medieval mindset, the community wasn't the one who judged him in the end.

Once again, I find it to be **very highly comical** that Petrosianic, who, for his being a person who *claims* that he is ignoring me here on this Message Board, he sure does pay *a whole lot of attention to me* in the midst of all of his so-called "ignoring" of me!

Wow, Petrosianic, this just continues to be funny..., funny..., funny...!!


Chess Fan

Here is an interesting and informative article by Britt Gillette, which is titled, "Blind Faith In Jesus Christ?"


Chess Fan

I'm assuming you're taking about mercury thermometers. In that case, we do know where it breaks down in measuring temperatures as we know how mercury behaves, and we can predict how it will behave because we have knowledge of its elemental structure.


Yes, my analogy using NY-LA was a bit faulty in that aspect. We can still use Ghost Town though. If 100 different people told you the approximate distance, provided you evidence as to why it was that far, and the only counter-evidence you had was a scrap of paper written by an anonymous writer several thousand years ago when it was impossible for him to even have the concept of calculating distances much less the existence of a Ghost Town, then to ignore people with evidence in favour of a piece of paper is rather silly.

Secondly, we are not unsure of dinosaurs. What are you referring to? The evidence for the existence of dinosaurs is like the evidence for the existence of mammoths. It is simply undisputable. True, they caused a bit of a crisis in faith in the 1700/1800s (why would God allow creatures to go extinct? If God made a perfect world, then doesn't extinction mean it was not perfect, where do these beasts fit in with the Bible, etc etc), and as a result, some tried to explain away the bones (just big crocodiles, turtles, or they were still living somewhere and not extinct).

But within a decade or two of these finds even the die-hards (no pun intended) had to admit there was now so much evidence that these terrible lizards' existed that arguing against their existence was pointless and only brought disrepute to their beliefs. Some of this information is summarized nicely in that book on mass extinction.


Physical evidence only? As opposed to...??

A long read here on dating methods Note that the verification comes from several sources. If there were profound errors in dating methods then those and other dating results would not show a pattern.

But suppose you don't want to talk about millions and billions of years. What evidence is there that the earth is older than, say, 10,000 years?

Glacial cores, for one. This article-pdf correlates the Dansgaard-Oeschger Events to what they found in the cores. The DOEs are cyclic climate fluctuations based on things like the periodicity of the earths orbit, the tilt of the axis, etc, all superimposed one on top of the other. These go back a few hundred thousand years.

Also, even if the DOEs were not non-existent we could still get an age of the earth. The concentration of gases/isotopes in the air will vary on a regular cycle season to season (e.g. CO2 drops in the summer in the north, rises in winter) so analyses of the gases in the samples give us a time line. Plus, there is plant pollen embedded in the ice. Since pollen is only produced in the spring then you can count back the number of years using that. Or you can use particulate matter (increased dust levels). The oldest ice core record from Antarctica was about 500,000 years, and last year I was reading that they were hoping to go back 750,000 years from one particular drilling location.

You can also plot back the rate of change of the vegetation.
Using lake sediments (Lake Baikal, arctic lakes/ponds/bogs, etc) you can also see patterns, and again you can plot back well past the 6,000 year mark because there are many many indicators of yearly cycles. Check out After the Ice Age by Pielou on how things changed bit by bit and how we know how they changed. Fascinating book.

Then you have cross-correlations. For example, your radio-isotope dating tells you such and such a volcano exploded 50,000 years ago. You check out the local ice cores (or in some cases, sediment cores), count back the years and at around the 50,000 year mark you come across the isotopes, iridium, the dust, the ash from the volcanic explosion. And if the explosion is big enough it will alter the vegetation community, may alter the climate and this too will be reflected in the particles in the cores as well as in the various gases.

Check this article where they've managed to use ocean sediments to date back more than half a million years. They used marine creature, oxygen isotopes and other items to help date it.

How do they know they actually did date things correctly? By cross-correlating with things like glacial cores. Again, if there were major errors/wrong assumptions in their methodology then you wouldn't be finding matches between these different techniques. But because you do find matches among sediments in oceans, lakes, cores from glaciers, dating of rocks, known impact/explosion events then you can be very sure you're on the right track.

And I haven't even touched upon remnant magnetism in lava flows or new rocks created by the spreading of continental plates (which not only tells us how fast the continents are moving, but how fast they moved in the past and in what direction, as well as the conditions of the magnetic field and placements of the poles), which themselves can be correlated with isotopes trapped in rocks/fossils/ice.

There are multiple lines of reasoning and multiple lines of evidence all interweaving to form one big coherent tapestry that is in general agreement. If these techniques did not work then out of 20 different dating methods, you'd end up with 20 different answers, almost all of them contradicting other ideas. But that is not what we see. Instead we see a broad-scale agreement, and using this knowledge we can make predictions about what we will find in areas not yet analyzed.

E.g. look up Lake Ellsworth, West Antarctica from which we should have water samples by 2012/13, and possible sediment cores some time after that (Lake Ellsworth is a lake that is under 3.2 km of ice sheets in Antarctica. Ice cores tell us how long the ice sheet has been around (a minimum estimate, by the way), and lake cores may very well take us back even further to a time when Antarctica wasn't covered in ice).

Even if you don't trust the assumptions in radio-dating that take you back millions or billions of years, there are still many other methods that will take you back 500,000 to a million years, and many many more that take you back more than 50,000 to 100,000 years. To say that the earth is 6,000 years old just contradicts the available evidence.

Ken, that's a nice post, but PA is trying to argue that mankind is only 6,000 years old, not the earth. It doesn't matter, because Ussher's methods have long since been exploded.

Here's what I had read and was trying to recall (the pdf was hidden on my external drive, and i just googled it now).

Radiometric Dating: A Christian Perspective. The abstract/summary have some good points.


And this point below is what I keep trying to emphasize.

So this paper, written by a Christian, is a must read for anyone who thinks the earth is only 6,000 or so years old. Or for anyone who is interested in knowing how we know what we know. As he said, reading this paper will promote greater understanding of the issue, and with greater understanding comes great responsibility (oops, channeling Uncle Ben again) greater wisdom when discussing the subject.

Aw nuts. Thanks Ed. That's what I get for trying to scan through numerous posts in a catch-up game.

On the other hand we do have evidence for humans and their tools, works being around for quite a long time too using dating from radiometric methods as well as from other methods (all cross-referenced where possible too).

Jared Diamond's book Guns, Germs and Steel summarizes the spread of humans throughout the world. By 500,000 BC they were across Europe. 20,000 to 12,000 BC they were on the Russian peninsula and crossing over into North America. By 10,000 BC they were down to the tip of South America. And they know this from radiometric dating, from evidence of domestication of select animals, from evidence of the plants people took with them, from climatic evidence where they know when a certain valley was flooded (or dried out) and tools/garbage/village under the water, or at the edge of what once was a lake, and from other sources.

Again, it tells a story. If there were mistakes in dating we wouldn't have such a consistent story with the oldest finds being in Africa and getting younger and younger sites as you spread out from Africa. If dating were problematic then you'd have young dates in Africa, old dates where they should be young, and basically willy-nilly dating, not a coherent picture.

Incidentally, I recommend Diamond's book for the whole theme on the fates of human societies. His other book Collapse is worth reading too...I have it but haven't made it all the way through. And if you want to read his book The Third Chimpanzee, you'll find a provocative idea behind the title.

The "Great Leap Forward" in human history is around 50,000 BC where garbage left behind becomes very interesting and tells a progressive story.

Hi Ed,
You think mankind is only 6000 years old? Or did I get you wrong? What I think is, because Adam was created on the sixth day and he lived through the sixth day and we are not sure how long the those days (God's days) represented. So my take is, mankind could be more than 6000 years!

Ken,
Thanks for the your informative post.

Few things..
I think sometimes circumstancial evidence is better than physical evidence. Anyway, I will look at the evidences you provided.

Another thing I wanted to ask. Do we have evidences of beings between 6000 years and millions years. I don't know but if that isn't the case, isn't that weird?

I'll be away this weekend. Catch you later, guys.

P.S. Haven't read your posts fully. You state existence of human in BC 20,000, BC 50,000 etc. I'll talk to you after I read the whole thing.

Hey, have a great weekend, PircAlert, my brother!


Chess Fan