Science Definition

The word science comes from the Latin "scientia" meaning knowledge.

Scientific knowledge is not revealed through ancient books but attained through study and its claims are tested by careful observation and experiment.  The theories of science, are not just someone's theories, but the conclusions of many experiments and rigorous thought processes.

The realm of Science is limited to the physical world.  Science deals with matter, energy, time and space and not our inner life.

Science is limited to just the material world.  We cannot ask God to move a mountain, and conclude since the mountain did not move, there is no God. Other things are left to philosophy and spiritual realms.  There is a joke that philosophers and the religious faithful have no trash bins.  

Non-Material World

The feeling of just being alive is not something to be tested in the science lab.  Consciousness in science is thought to be the workings of the brain.  The brain is made up of tissues, chemicals, molecules, atoms and atomic particles. Where is the stuff that makes consciousness?

All scientists are conscious, yet like fish that don't know they are in water, scientists gloss over the whole question.

Yet in our daily life, we are guided by our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts and what we believe in.  Science we use when we invent, when we are in school, and sometimes when we do ordinary things like driving. 

Our brain works on assumptions.  Neurons are triggered by a certain number of pulses from other cells.  They, in a manner of speaking vote.  When the pulse threshold reaches a certain point they fire.  The neuron output is binary, that is either on (fired) or off (not fired).

When we doing anything we have assumptions.  We believe that the floor is solid, that cars stop at stop signs, and certain people love us.  We can not put everything in a test-tube and prove it right.

We assume that our feelings are correct. We eat because we are hungry (not because we have done chemical tests on our sugar level in our blood.)  We play games and have fun, even though there is no scientific reason for doing so.  We have feelings that sometimes seem come from nowhere.  Most of us, most of the time do not think like scientists and use the scientific method frequently. 

Yet we use the fruits of science. Our cell phone is our constant companion, our cars seem part of our bodies, and the Internet is our resource.

Since about 70% of the people in the USA say they are Christian, we will now include the Bible in our discussion.

Blind Faith is Sinful

The first commandment (Exodus 20.3): "You shall have no other gods before Me".   Blind faith in the words of the Bible, is making the Bible a into a false god.  The Bible was written by people, who had blind faith in the idea that God was speaking to them the absolute truth.

Yes, I am sorry to say, that the Bible is filled with errors.  According to the Bible, the Earth was created before there was light which in truth must come from the sun or stars). (Genesis 1:3).

The Bible is immoral. Our loving God, killed everyone on Earth, except Noah's family, with the great flood. (Genesis 6:5). The Bible does not know how long a lifetime is. Noah was 500 years old (Genesis 5:32). The Bible says that snakes eat dirt. (Genesis 3:24).  The Bible says you can handle snakes, and drink deadly things (Mark 16:18).

Believing in the Bible with blind faith not only breaks the first commandment, it promotes superstition and ignorance.

Before you think I am a typical non-believer I want to say that I believe in a loving, kind and intelligent God, who knows all about science as He created it.  I believe that the Bible also contains very good teaching stories about love and faith in doing what is right and holy.  "Even though I walk throug the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff, they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4)

But the Bible need editing and is so out of date.

An Attack on Science

The first young Earth Creationist was the Archbishop Usher.

The Irish Archbishop of Armagh, James Usher (1581 – 1656) decided that that the Earth was created on October 22, 4004 BC.  He did this by adding up all the generations (one begot after another) he found in the Bible.

Here science is turned up-side-down.  You know the truth, and then find ways to prove it true.  You select experiments that give you the answers you want.  In some cases fake evidence is presented.

So consider the many things we have today.  Kings and queens never had air conditioning and all the cures of modern medicine.  We have so many technical goodies, and they work, yet they are complicated. Without science there would be none of these things.

So if you really don't like science, turn in your cell phones, computers, and television sets. Go back to the cave!

Of course science does not have all the answers, nor the final answer.  For big questions, who to marry, what laws we need, and how to be happy we have to understand more than science.  Oh, I am sorry. Modern psychology does tell us how to be happy.  Exercise and love do the trick.  Money does not help in the long run unless one cannot afford shelter, food or other essentials.

Astronomy in the Biblical Days

The firmament meaning "the sky" is found 17 times in the King James Version of the Bible.  "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the water from the water."  "Sheol" is a Hebrew word and is considered the place of darkness which all the dead go, both the righteous and unrighteous.  A far cry from modern science.  Young Earth Creationists use the Bible to do science and we wonder what happened to the firmaments in the sky.

Modern Astronomy

The Earth goes around the sun.  There are eight planets.  There are six planets visible by the naked eyes: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  The planets Uranus and Neptune can only been seen using a telescope.   The closest star is 4 light years away and the farthest are billions of light years away.

Young Earth Creationist Theories Debunked

The Creationist's Science Classroom

Young Earth Creationist Theories are easily debunked.  For additonal details, search Google "creationist theories debunked."

The Creationists present there cases and we present the scientific answers:

1) Sediment

There is very little sediment on the seafloor. Therefore the Earth is young.

 Answer: True but this is explained by plate tectonics. The ocean floor is moving.    It is created at mid-ocean ridges and then its being subducted under the continents.

2) Fracturing

How could a series of sedimentary layers fold without fracturing?  The only way is for all the seimentary layers to be laid down in rapid succesion and then be folded whole still soft and pliable.

 Answer: Hard rock will bend with enough heat and constant pressure over long time intervals.  Things happen over billions of years. In spite of the erosion that has taken place, geological records stand well correlated with each other as shown by paleomagnetism, radiometric dating and fossils. The earth is so old one would not expect it to be like neat layers of a cake.

3) Soft Tissue

How could there be soft tissue in some fossils. 

 Answer: Some fossils do have soft tissue, but they are still millions of years old.  Dr. Schweitzer's discovery is remarkable in that DNA can live so long, not in that the fossils are from a young Earth.

4) Temperature

The sun would be faint when life was supposed to begun 3.5 billion years ago.

 Answer: Yes Carl Sagan and George Mullen brought this up, but it was only a untested theory.  The geological record shows otherwise.  The Earth's temperature has been remarkably steady except for some cold phases.

5) Magnetic Field

The Earth's magnetic field is rapidly decaying and without it life could not exist.

Answer: Actually the Earth's magnetic field keeps earth keeps changing back and forth. It gets stronger, weakens, then reverses. The north and south magnetic poles have reversed at least a 170 times.  So the magnetic might be decaying today, but it will increase again in the future.  This cyclic magnetic field has been recorded in the rocks under the Atlantic Ocean.  As lava cools, it take on the current magnetic field.  With the ocean bottom moving, the rocks form a magnetic recording of the magnetism of the Earth.

6) Helium Leakage

Helium diffuses out of rocks quite rapidly, but there is still a lot helium within radioactive rocks such as uranium and thorium.  So the Earth must be young.

Answer: Rocks deep in the ground have huge pressure on there surfaces, and this plus other conditions tend to make these rocks retain their helium.  Helium diffusion rates are not the same for all rocks.

7) Carbon 14 Decay

Carbon 14 dating has been detected in "ancient" rocks although its half-life is only 5,730 years old. 

Answer:  Carbon 14 dating is based on the fact that cosmic rays produce radioactive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.  After a plant or animal dies, the carbon 14 is no long breathed and carbon 14 starts to decay at a known rate.  So dying is the basis for carbon 14 dating to start.  Other radioactive sources such as uranium can produce carbon 14 in any rock that contains carbon.

8) Comets

Comets are short-lived and they should be all melted if the Earth was old. 

 Answer:  New comets are appearing all the time.  They come from the Oort Cloud that is about two light years from the sun.  Being so far away from the sun, the comets in the Oort Cloud last indefinitely until they are perturbed and start their journey towards the sun.

9)  Ocean Salt

There is very little salt in the sea for the Earth to be so old. 

 Answer: Salt comes out of the ocean too.  It precipitates out and falls to the sea bed.  The ocean bottom is moving under the continents so it is renewed over time.  Ocean spray contains salt, and tinny salt particles enable rain drops to form.  There are many minor processes including: along the coast lines, ocean spray evaporates on the beaches and rocks.  Due to global warming, melting water from the polar regions dilutes the concentration of salt in the oceans.

10) Ancient DNA

DNA has been found in "Ancient" Bacteria. 

Answer: The bacteria in question is the so-called Lazarus bacteria discovered in a salt crystal dated 250 million years ago.  The salt is 250 million years old, but the bacteria is probably the result of more recent contamination.

Historical Proofs of an Old Earth

1) Cooling of the Earth

In 1897, Lord Kelvin assumed that the Earth was originally molten and calculated a date based on cooling through conduction and radiation. The age of Earth was calculated to be about 24-40 million years based on the laws of thermodynamics.

Unknown at the time was that the Earth has an internal heat source (radioactive decay)

2) Ocean Salt

In 1899, John Joly (Irish) calculated the rate of delivery of salt to the ocean. River water has only a small concentration of salts. Rivers flow to the sea, therefore, evaporative concentration of salts can be calculated.

By this method, the age of oceans will equal the total salt in oceans (in grams) divided by rate of salt added (grams per year)

Age of Earth was calculated to be 90-100 million years.

Problems: no way to account for recycled salt, salt incorporated into clay minerals, salt deposits.

3) Sedimentation Rate

In 1860, the thickness of total sedimentary record is divided by average sedimentation rates (in mm/yr) and calculated to be about 3 million years old. In 1910, the same measurement yields about 1.6 billion years old.

Early measurements of maximum thickness of sediment ranged from 25,000 m to 112,000 m. With more recent mapping, thickness of fossiliferous rocks is at least 150,000 m. The average sedimentation rates are about 0.3 m/1000 years. At this rate, the age of the first fossiliferous rocks is about 500 million years.

Problems: This calculation does not account for past erosion or differences in sedimentation rates; also ancient sedimentary rocks are metamorphosed or melted.

Charles Lyell (1800's) compared amount of evolution shown by marine mollusks in the various series of the Tertiary System with the amount that had occurred since the beginning of the Pleistocene. He estimated about 80 million years for the Cenozoic Era alone.

4) Radiometric Dating

Radioactivity is discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896. In 1905, Rutherford and Boltwood used radioactive decay to measure the age of rocks and minerals. Uranium decay produces He, leading to a date of 500 million years for the oldest rocks.

In 1907, Boltwood suspected that lead was the stable end product of the decay of uranium and published the age of a sample of urananite based on Uranium-Lead dating to be 1.64 billion years.

Mass spectrograph was used after WWI (1918). Led to the discovery of over 200 isotopes. Many radioactive elements can be used as geologic clocks since each element decays at its own nearly constant rate. Once this decay rate is known, geologists can estimate the length of time over which decay has been occurring by measuring the amount of radioactive parent and the amount of stable daughter elements.

So far, oldest dated Earth rocks are 3.96 billion years. Older rocks include meteorites and moon rocks, where Moon rocks from the Lunar highland are about 4.5 billion years old, mare basalt rocks are 3.2 - 3.8 billion years old. Meteorites are all older than 4.5 billion years.

 
Modern Proofs of an Old Earth

The accepted age of the Earth is about 4.54 billion years.  The accepted age of the Universe is about 13.77 billion years.

1) Proof that the earth is older than 10,000 years:

Dendrochronology ( Counting tree rings inside trees)

Human Y-chromosomal mutation rates (Based ancestry, and using male Y chromosome and female mitochondrial mutation rates)

Oxidizable carbon ratio dating (Measuring oxidizable carbon in charcoal which increases with time)

Rock varnish thickness (Measuring thickness of desert rock varnish, which slowly thickens.)

Thermoluminescence dating (Background radiation traps increasing amounts of electrons that are measured)


2) Proof that the earth is older than 100,000 years:

Coral Reefs Growth (Corals reefs grow in size at a known rate. The Great Barrier Reef is estimated to be 25 million years old)

Fission track dating in rocks (Uranium decay produces fission tracks at a constant rate and these can be counted.)

Ice layering bands (Ice sheets contain alternating layers of light and dark ice and these can be counted.)

Lack of DNA in fossils (DNA of average completely decays in 100 thousand years.)

Permafrost thickness (Takes thousands of years to form. Prudhoe Bay has 600 meter thick permafrost, and took 225 thousand of years to form.)

Glacial rock rind weathering (Weathered material on glacial rocks which builds up over time. Basalt and andesite rocks have been dated 300 thousand years.)

3) Proof that the earth is older than 1,000,000 (million) years:

Amino acid rotation called racemization (Amino acids start with L molecular rotation, then gradually turn so that they have L & D rotation. Takes millions of years.)

Baptistina asteroid family orbits (These asteroid have similar orbits and their origin can be traced back to a collision 80 million years ago.)

Continental drift (Based on geological formations, and fossil deposits, South America and Africa were part of the same landmass. They are moving apart at 2 cm per year, and their drift has been going on for 200 million years.)

Cosmogenic nuclide dating (Cosmic rays produce a stream of nuclides in the atmosphere that fall to the ground. By measuring the build-up, objects can be dated over millions of years.)

Earth erosion (Example, the Grand Canyon was made over the course of a million years based on normal rates of water erosion.)

Geomagnetic reversals (Found under the Atlantic Ocean, the seabed reverses its magnetic orientation.  Over 170 magnetic reversals have occurred. The time between reversals varies between 50,000 to 800,000 years) 

Impact craters frequency (Odds of a large asteroid hitting the earth per year is once every 313 thousand years. Over 100 impact craters have been observed.)

Iron-manganese nodules deposits (Using Beryllium-10 dating, these nodules take several million years to grow 1 cm. )

Length of the prehistoric day (Coral growth lines indicate that a day 370 million years ago was shorter than today -22 hours.)

Milankovitch astronomical cycles (Important to the study of Earth's temperature over long periods.  Three main cycles:

1. The Perihelion Precess Cycle 20,000 years

2. The Obliquity Cycle{axial tilt} 40,000 years

3.  Eccentricity Cycle 100,000 to 400,000 years

Naica megacrystals (Huge 11-meter Gypsum cave crystals located near Chihuahua Mexico are older than one million years

Nitrogen in diamonds (Nitrogen permeation takes 200 to 2000 million years)

Petrified wood (The permineralization process takes millions of years)

Relativistic plasmatic jets (Consists of plasma ejected from quasars and galaxy centers. Some are over one million light years in length.)

Sedimentary varves (Layers of sedimentary rock laid down a year at a time in glacial lakes. The Green river formation in Utah has 20 million years of varves.)

Stalactite Growth (Formed on ceilings of caves, with growth of 0.1 mm per year. One stalactite is 8.1 meters in length)

Space weathering (Most asteroids have a red tint due to cosmic radiation and micrometer impacts. )

4) Proof that the earth and the universe is older than 1,000,000,000 (billion) years:

Distant starlight ( Light travels 186 thousand miles per second. Light from Hubble ultra deep field has taken 10 billion years to reach earth.)

Helioseismology (Study of the pressure waves in the sun, shows that the composition of the Sun changes as it ages. This method shows the sun is 4.57 billion years old.)

Lunar retreat (The moon used to be closer to the earth, and went around the earth faster than it does now. This is been shown to be true based on tidalites found in southern Australia. The rocks showed bands corresponding to semi-monthly neap tides. The monthly lunar cycle has lengthen.)

Radioactive decay (Some rocks and other materials are unstable.  Their nucleus breaks apart as the material decays.  For example Uranium-238 decays into Lead-206.  It takes 4.4 billion years for half the Uranium to decay into Lead.   Carbon 14 has a half-life of 5,730 years.  The decay rate has a well known shape.  Thus rocks and other materials can be accurately dated.  Radiometric results have been confirmed by independent dating methods. Radiometric dating was first suggested in 1905 by a British physicist, Lord Rutherford. In 1907 Professor B. B. Boltwood, a radiochemist at Yale University, made the first attempt to establish a geologic time scale.  Meteorites have been radioactively dated.

Mass Spectrometery (The invention of the mass spectrometer after World War I led to the discovery of isotopes. A mass spectrometer takes a vaporized sample of the material, and sends it to a large magnet. If the vaporized material The amount of bending that occurs due to magnet, indicates and the calculation of accurate decay rates. Not until the 1950s, however, was precise dating achieved and accepted by the scientific community.)

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