• hope@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Not to argue for creationism, but this argument sucks. Lead can be produced by supernova, not just through decay of heavier elements. But even that’s besides the point, since if you believe some entity created the universe, surely said entity could have created whatever ratio of lead to uranium they wanted. It’s not a falsifiable claim, there’s really no disproving it, unfortunately.

    (Not so fun fact: the environmental impact of leaded gasoline was discovered by trying to estimate the age of the earth using the radio of lead to uranium in uranium deposits, but the pollution from leaded gasoline was throwing the measurements off.)

    • TaTTe@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Also I’m amazed by how people don’t seem to understand what half-life is. It’s not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It’s the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.

      So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.

    • Empricorn@feddit.nl
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      1 hour ago

      Also, we could be way off on the age because we just don’t know. Sure, we can collect data and extrapolate for billions of years and assume that all elements have always decayed at the same rate, but short of living through it and accurately measuring it with modern instruments, molecules-to-man “macro” evolution can’t actually be proven.

      This is why, using the Scientific Method, it is still a theory. A theory accepted by most scientists, but still. There’s a certain arrogance in declaring solved something we can’t actually know for 100% certainty.

    • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.

      Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:

      1. god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
      2. God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
      3. God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
      4. God creates the moon and sun and stars. This one seems out of order to me… maybe just the earth and solar system stabilize. I don’t know how pll ok ants exist without the sun, so maybe it’s microbes or something.
      5. God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
      6. God creates modern land animals, then creates man and woman. That makes sense, mankind is certainly new with only a few hundred thousand years of records before civilization starts.

      That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.

      • krashmo@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        The Bible is a couple thousand chapters long. The creation story is the first two chapters. It’s pretty obviously only attempting to establish that God created the universe in some ambiguous way and move on with the story. That doesn’t stop people from inferring all sorts of things from what is essentially a poem.

      • Buelldozer@lemmy.today
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        2 hours ago

        Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.

        Most people don’t know that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can be and is used to denote wildly different lengths of time.

        If anyone is interested you can read a fine destruction of the stupid “Young Earth” argument at the link I provided.

        The “Young Earth” people, both Christian and Jew, are trying to shoe horn something into the Bible that doesn’t fit and doesn’t need to exist. It’s nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto an old, wrong headed, and man-made theory.

        • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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          23 minutes ago

          Thanks for that

          I don’t see why God must be incompatible with evolution or the Big Bang or really any of science. God created us to be clever, surely that includes using logic and science to learn about the world.

          Personally I’m agnostic and I try not to judge people. I do judge people who dismiss science and decide faith alone is better.

        • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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          23 minutes ago

          Personally I’m not a believer (I’m agnostic and believe if there is a God, they’re best served living a good life), but I don’t see why God is incompatible with evolution or the Big Bang or really any of science.

          I don’t judge people who believe,

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        The original wording can’t be read as eon instead of a day because plants and trees could’t last for an eon before the sun was created.

    • PaintedSnail@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

        • tetris11@lemmy.ml
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          1 hour ago

          There’s a fun belief in physics regarding this “superdeterminism”.

          It essentially states that two entangled particles exhibit entanglement not because of any property between them but because they share the same cause origin point (the big bang) and that their respective spin states correlate more with the big bang than each other. Essentially the spin experiments will always appear to show entanglement, but it’s actually a byproduct of the big bang.

          Which, as we can all maybe agree, is fucking weak by order of being disprovable

    • StaticFalconar@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.

    • conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      The weirdest part to me is thinking the timeless omnipotent god that the Bible explicitly says considers a thousand years less than nothing actually literally meant that he created everything in what we’d perceive as 7 days when talking to whatever arbitrary scribe wrote down the creation myth for him.

      • Forester@yiffit.net
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        3 hours ago

        So it’s more like God appears to this guy named Abraham and tells him the story and then his great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great, great great grandchildren wrote it down. But in the original Hebrew it doesn’t use a word that means day they use a word that means unit of time.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          That still doesn’t work because plants and trees are created before the sun. Not to mention the lack of pollinators because God hadn’t yet created insects.

          • Forester@yiffit.net
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            2 hours ago

            Clearly you’ve never played telephone.

            I’m just amazed that the ancient israelis got it as close as they did to our modern understanding of the process of the formation of the universe through only oral tradition and not from any hard sources of science.

            Personally I’m in the camp that says trust the science and realize that ancient Israeli tribals weren’t the best at keeping 100% accurate records.

            I’m also partial to the simulation theory variant where we are the sims on Gods PC.