I’ve heard this argument from quite a few fundamentalists, but I don’t remember hearing it before the 1988 tests which dated the shroud to the 13th century AD.
I do remember the conservative National Review predicting shortly before the results came out that the shroud’s age would be verified, lending credence to its authenticity.
I’m referring, of course, to the Shroud of Turin.
I understand your concern, but then again many people believe in “directed evolution”; i.e., giraffes needed to get food from trees so their decendants were more likely to have long necks. The empahasis on randomness is to show that genetic mutations are random, but natural selection “chooses” those that are beneficial.
Evolution, like most science, is butchered in schools when it is taught. The media is even worse.
Well, evolution is directed. Those characteristics that result in survival long enough to reproduce are favored. The essence of Darwin’s theory is the natural selection from among all features those that favor survival and reproduction. I don’t believe that Darwin even knew about the randomness of mutations. In Darwin’s day there was no known mechanism by which new features could arise and so his theory was restricted to selecting from among already existing features in order to get the best fit to the environment and win the competition for food. The generality and power of the idea of natural selection is demonstrated by the fact that it was strengthened and not replaced by something else upon the discovery of genetics and the genetic code.
Well, they got it partly right. The carbon dating did verify its age which established its authenticity: it was dated to within 50 years of the point when the local Catholic bishop declared it one more pious fraud. (Of course, since then there has been a merry dispute over the testing, but the original test did place it right about the time that the bishop declared it had been painted. It is an authentic pious fraud.)
The Shroud tests might have increased the awareness and popularity of questioning carbon 14 dating but young earthers have questioned it at least since 1974, the date of the first edition of the book Scientific Creationism.
Just because someone can post a couple of paragraphs in response doesn’t mean that it isn’t a stumper. You often see this with creationsts. What matters is not that they can offer arguments that are right. They often don’t care whether or not their arguments are right. They just toss stuff out there and as long as there is some response to science, that’s good enough for them, no matter how goofy or wrong what they say is.
I mean, this guy misrepresents “soft tissue,” believes we’ve found human/dino tracks together, and other nonsense.
This is a good point and it’s something creationists don’t seem to realise (or perhaps realise and don’t care). It is insufficient simply to have a set of workable arguments against a set of mainstream scientific theories, it is crucial that this set of arguments is also presentable as a coherent whole. Creationism falls so woefully short in this respect that I believe it isn’t even trying, because the motive is actually not anything about science anyway, it’s about keeping the blinkers on the faithful.
You just have to have a reason to shut your mind to radiometric dating, a reason to shut your mind to genome analysis, a reason to shut your mind to fossil evidence and a reason to shut your mind to geological evidence. Having shut your mind, you don’t need to worry if all these reasons were mutually compatible and consistent - which of course they are not.
There is one rather interesting contradiction with regard to radiometric dating in the book Scientific Creationism. In pointing out possible reasons for a change in the rate of uranium decay, making such a dating method unreliable, the book cites “reversals of the earth’s magnetic field” on page 142 of the Second Edition (paperback). It then immediately goes on to say, “… such phenomena are commonly accepted now as having occurred in the past …”
However, in attempting to prove a young earth the book cites the work of Prof. Thomas G. Barnes in estimating the lifespan of the magnetic field. In this work Prof. Barnes assumes that the field started at some strength and decays exponentially. He then purports to show that starting from the present field strength and extrpolating backward exponentialy results in an impossibly high field if the magnetic field is more than 10000 years old. All well and good. Unfortunately, in a footnote on page 157 the book states that Prof. Barnes “… firmly refutes the various arguments (e.g. supposed magnetic field reversals) that have been offered by evolutionists against [Barnes’] strong evidence [as to the magnetic field decay.]”
So, to undermine uranium dating the magnetic field reverses from time to time. To support Prof. Barnes’ magnetic field decay idean it doesn’t reverse. Very convenient.
But wouldn’t their rebuttal be that the Big Bang theory similarly requires that the basic laws of matter and energy have changed since the beginning - because the Big Bang theory requires that matter expanded exponentially in a few seconds, in a way that could not happen now.
So why couldn’t God have made the speed of light from those stars much, much faster at the moment of creation, so it would reach us now, but slowed down the speed of light once that original light was on its way?
Or alternatively, what makes you think that the light now reaching us was part of those stars? God made the stars, and He created a stream of photons in transit between those stars and the Earth, so that it’s all one continuous process.
Just askin’.
Clarification. I agree, as David Simmons, Tripwire and Mangetout have argued, that just because YE apologists can string together a bunch of words doesn’t mean their position has merit. (For more and better apologetics on dinosaurs, BTW, see here; and this article gives a pretty good idea of how little dinosaurs bother YEers.) On the contrary, from a scientific perspective, their position has no merit whatsoever. But, this misapprehends the purpose of apologetics. Apologetics almost always are written to confirm belief, not to sway the opposition. If one starts from the premise that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, believes conventional science contradicts Genesis, and wants to rescue the Bible from that contradition, these loopy apologetics will work. The OP’s question, in substance, is whether there’s some argument that will pierce this armor. IMHO, the answer is “no.”
Thinking it over, though, I think several people have suggested what may be the best argument. Pose to YEer this question: Is there any evidence that would change your mind? The only honest answer is “no.” (The reporter in the above-linked article asked this question and that’s the answer he got.) Okay, skeptic responds, you may construct your belief system on those terms - it’s a free universe - but that’s not science and we aren’t required to admit such ideas to the science curriculum. Have a nice day.
Because we would witness distant events occurring in slow motion; just like if you record audio at a very high tape speed, then play it back at a lower one.
You could argue that, and it’s just a variant on the whol Omphalos thing, but the point is that the light we perceive as coming from distant stars isn’t portraying them as being there, it’s portraying things happening to them, so if the light that shows us the image of, say, a supernova at one million light years distance is telling us that the supernova event occurred one million years ago; if in fact there was no such thing as ‘one million years ago’, then we are being presented with the image of a fictional supernova that never actually happened outside of God’s imagination.
However, the shorter answer to both your questions is in fact “because, save for religious dogma, there is no reason to imagine that things are any different than an abundance of evidence makes them appear to be”.
Here Here!