- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
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Technically this could all be true even if the universe were created 4000 years ago. As somebody says in Robert Heinlein’s novel Job: A Comedy of Justice, “Yes, the universe is billions of years old, but it was created 4000 years ago. It was created old.” (approximate quote from memory)
I absolutely agree with science, but strictly speaking we can’t know for sure the universe isn’t the creation of some superbeing operating outside of it - or it could even be a simulation.
The existence of a god is something that can’t be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I’ve been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I’m living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn’t true. I haven’t personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn’t want to believe, there’s really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam’s Razor.
Yeah, this is broken because all lead did not have to come from polonium, that’s how half-lives work.
It’s still 100% bullshit in every way, someone just needs to have chatgpt4 sort out the current mass fraction to explain why, I’m way too lazy to argue against insanity.
I assume someone saying this is a creationist and can just say god created Earth already with the lead in it. Therefore it is a pointless discussion.
Which raises the question of why he would create a planet with the illusion of age and send you to hell for falling for his own trick.
And use his omnipotent power to hide from you while watching your life play out in exactly the way his omniscience let him know it would before he even created the earth or you.
Because believers will listen to Christianity’s divinely inspired interpretation of the Bible that says that. Non-christians won’t listen to that. Therefore anyone who believes the earth is older has rejected Christianity. He did it to help identify the non-believers because he’s a petty bitch.
lady of the pain tier deityship
I always found it funny how they’ll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say “oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they’ve been in the sky for a long time” but very often they just don’t have an answer because they didn’t think of one. Unfortunately, there’s almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to
The debate between Bill Nye and a creationist is so rage inducing. It’s a terrible premise and the fact that Bill even agreed to it gave the creationist credit.
The correct answer would have been: “Why should I? You’re an idiot.”
When I was being raised as a young earth creationist, the earth was supposedly 12,000-20,000 years old. Then it was 10,000 years old. Then only 6,000. After I outgrew that nonsense, I joked that in a few decades YECs would say that their god created the earth in 1980, and anyone older than 40 are agents of the devil sent to test your faith.
Of course, the universe was actually created in 1970 and anyone claiming to be older than 54 is an agent of Microsoft sent to test your faith in Unix.
God created your with your memories as-is this morning when you woke up
Last Thursday.
Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
I was also raised as a young earth creationist and it was always 6k years old for me but I could not begin to tell you why.
I had a dude come up to me at the reference desk and tell me that the earth can’t be billions (he said trillions, lol) of years old because erosion from the Mississippi River would make it wider and deeper than it is. I pulled up some info including the idea that the Mississippi was something that came about more recently because of plate shifting, etc and he just said, “Nah.”
But I take everything literally, other than when its inconvenient
I’m not even sure how you get to 4000 years old from biblical literalisim.
Edit: going strictly by the biblical account, Adam lived to 930 years, and Noah 950. IIRC, their lives did not overlap. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. A whole bunch of stuff happens in between Noah and Jesus. So even if you’re working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
So even if you’re working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
You can’t. The “Young Earth” people are morons.
The original calculation (adding up all the ages in the genealogies in the Bible) was done a few hundred years ago, but all the young earth creationists I saw put the start at 4000 A.D., so 6000 years ago.
4000 A.D
you mean BC?
Because anti-evolutionists decided a myth that the Earth is only 4000 years old is the quickest way to refute claims of evolution.
It’s not an argument one forms by observing evidence.
There is a very old Jewish Holiday which celebrates new year on a calendar starting with the creation of the Universe, only about 5000+ years, but even that is obscure af.
The Bible has a long list of names with birthdays and who begat whom. It came from Irish archbishop and scholar James Ussher.
If you believe in the Bible, you get a 4000 year old Earth.
Ussher calculated 4004BC as the start of the universe, which would be about 6000 years ago.
That’s my point. Most YEC point to 6000 years. Even within their own framework, I don’t see how you get to 4000 years. My best guess is they saw 4004BC and forgot that 1 BC was about 2000 years ago.
This is exactly what it is. When everything you believe is made up, it’s easy to accidentally make up the wrong number and then believe that instead.
destroy all religion for the sake of humanity
Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can’t argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it’s now) which basically uses the same argument.
“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove
It’s also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.
That does explain why I can never get the hang of Thursdays
What, were you born today or something!
We all were! Oh wait, that’s This Thursdayism.
And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.
Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.
I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.
eat lead? this guy probably has already done that one
Probably not willingly. Republican States are often horrible at updating infrastructure, and due to the lack of a well educated population, they don’t suffer much repercussion for that. Very high chance they grew up with or still have lead pipes.
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.)
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.
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.
Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.
Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:
- god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
- God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
- God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
- 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.
- God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
- 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.
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.
It’s literally a poem in the original language.
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.
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.
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,
Simple answers for simple minds
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.
This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
I thought carbon dating of fossils was our best argument against the 4000 years myth.
God could have put the fossils there with the right carbon isotopes.
You can’t use logic to disprove belief in magic.
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
Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.
Yes but this is a 16 year who watched a YouTube and owns noobs
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.
If it wasn’t a day then how did all the plants and trees live without sunlight?
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.
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.
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.
There’s bread from 14,000 years ago
Look I don’t like them either, but you can’t refer to crusty bishops that way
Young earth creationists make up new element called “creationite” from which all elements came from, thereby filling in the radioactive decay plot hole in their narrative.
Real question: Is the decay of uranium the only natural way to produce lead? If so TIL.
you can also lead by example
Instructions unclear. Got diagnosed with lead poisoning
That’s what happens when you get a MBA
Iron is the heaviest element capable of being created inside stars, via fusion. Once iron is fused, the star begins to rapidly collapse.
Elements heavier than iron (28) are the result of supernova explosions, which produce energies high enough to create these heavier atoms. It is further possible, as described in the image, for very heavy elements to decay into lighter more stable elements, those still being heavier than iron.
Lead is 82.
That’s what I learned in school, but there’s been some research since suggesting stars produces significant quantities of elements up to lead during their lifetimes, even though it’s a net energy loss.
Interesting. Of note, this process would mainly be in a very specific kind of star, and still would depend on an iron “seed” leftover from a previous supernova. Technically, still requires a “regular” supernova.
No. Nucleosynthesis of lead within stars generated from supernovae make up the bulk of the existing lead on Earth. Uranium decay does provide some additional lead inventory but would be fairly small in comparison.
But the presence of it in the first place within second generation stars proves that lead is billions of years old.
When supernovas explode they’re responsible for most exotic elements larger than iron. So it’s either that or radioactive decay.
