How We Don't Know The Earth Is That Ancient - Part II

How we Don't Know the Earth is Deep Time Ancient (Answering First Part of a Video) · How We Don't Know The Earth Is That Ancient - Part II

Second half of this video:

How We Know The Earth Is Ancient
7th April 2020 | PBS Space Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgiHreswj0

I

8:03 "Figuring out the initial content is typically impossible - at least directly"

Hear, hear!

5700 years? Thought it was 5730!

8:40 "resulting in a constant proportion of C-14 within the atmospheric CO2"

We know it is in fact not completely constant. And I here mean it is admitted by your side. Not just we Creationists.

Since Industrial Revolution it has gone down. 1950 carbon dates as 1750, until you fix that with calibration.

Between c. 760 BC and 450 BC, the uncalibrated readings are around 550. Since Rome was founded in 753 BC and became a Republic in 510 BC, carbon dates of earliest clear Rome have been taken - I'd say mistakenly - to indicate Rome was actually founded c. 550 BC, by Etruscans like the Tarquins. Just a few decades before going Republic.

See here for the calibration:

High-Precision Decadal Calibration of the Radiocarbon Time Scale, AD 1950–6000 BC
Minze Stuiver (a1) and Bernd Becker (a2)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/highprecision-decadal-calibration-of-the-radiocarbon-time-scale-ad-19506000-bc/F1AB60097B0184501418D3EAEAD2EA90

9:11 "only accurate to about 10 half lives, around 50 000 years"

If as much.

If there was a change in cosmic radiation, leading to very low carbon 14 production up to Flood, very high from Flood to Babel, gradually lowering to present one after Babel, and Babel (real dates 2607 to 2556 BC, or a little narrower) is Göbekli Tepe (carbon dates 9600 to 8600 BC), the Biblical chronology is adequate.

Creation vs. Evolution : New Tables
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2020/08/new-tables.html

So, sth carbon dated 50 000 years BP would be the centuries preceding the Flood (which happened 2957 BC).

II

9:23 710 million vs 4.5 billion years for two isotopes of Uranium.

Problem is - how do you even remotely double check such a half life against radioactive date matching historical one? With carbon, we can double check and do double check the 5730 years' halflife by such and such a number of years ago in 16th C. matching such and such a remainder c. 95 pmC.

With carbon, even 11 years and some fractions will get you down to 0.9986 of the content you start with, 5730 : 512 matching 512th root of 0.5.

But how do you get to check 1 386 718.75 years against recorded historic fact? You don't.

9:33 With both decaying to different isotopes of lead ...

Meaning the isotopes of lead found in contact with Uranium is then used to measure original content of Uranium?

This is lots less secure than "measuring" original content of C-14. For that one, not too far back (I disagree where limit goes), tree rings, and most definitely historic dates can by calibration imply that original content was near 100 pmC - or that it wasn't, if you accept the Bible as history. If you go back far enough.

9:58 Any lead in a zircon came from uranium?

CMI has answered a question involving this point (I don't feel I'm obliged to use only my own material in answering):

"My comment about the inclusion of uranium and exclusion of lead during the formation of zircon crystals was just a repeat of an assertion made by Dr Payne. Not being a chemist, a mineralogist or a metallurgist, I have no reason to dispute this claim and, hence, did not include any further discussion. I would note, however, that the efficiency of the exclusion was not mentioned (i.e. is 100% of any lead excluded from the crystal or, perhaps, less than 100%). Nor was there discussion about how well the experimental conditions that have been mentioned would have represented the situation within crystallizing magmas. Uniformitarians assume magmas crystallized slowly over millions of years under conditions of thermodynamic equilibrium. However, the biblical scenario suggests magmas crystallized quickly, and anticipates non-equilibrium conditions, and this would affect the way lead would have been incorporated in the zircon crystals."

More on radioactive dating problems
Published: 20 June 2015 (GMT+10) [feedback]
https://creation.com/radioactive-dating-problems

10:22 On same article, Tas Walker answers (quoted by author) for Concordia technique, that usually the curves do not match up. And if there were more than one metamorphic event, the intersection of curves is meaningless.

III

10:56 No, actually they did not prove that anything was many millions of light years away.

The series of such "cosmic distance scale" beyond "within Solar System, i e from alpha Centauri four light years away, depends on accepting Heliocentrism as true and then c. 20 (or 25?) arc seconds back and forth each year as "aberration" and after that the minor variations around that value as "parallax" both phenomena depending on Earth moving in space, the first in relation to light and the second in relation to light sources.

If instead it is light sources, i e stars, that are moved by angels, this distance scale drops flat down. This includes the "much older universe" you are talking about.

IV

12:43 "several independent measures"

Many of which aren't even zircon ... here is what CMI answered back in 1982:

In Brief
This article is from Creation 5(1):17, June 1982
https://creation.com/in-brief-summary-of-technical-article-for-the-layman

The complaint about not removing refuted clutter in "proofs" seems to remain since then.

How we Don't Know the Earth is Deep Time Ancient (Answering First Part of a Video)

How we Don't Know the Earth is Deep Time Ancient (Answering First Part of a Video) · How We Don't Know The Earth Is That Ancient - Part II

How We Know The Earth Is Ancient
PBS Space Time | 7.IV.2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAgiHreswj0

I

0:46 It is perhaps possible the Sumero-Babylonian tablets are a bit older than Genesis, but by decades.

1:03 "the early Jews adopted this idea" - or Moses timely (knowingly or not) refuted Babylonian errors, since he collected the Hebrew traditions ranging back to day VI, when God and Adam and Eve were happy in Eden.

The genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11 (with Exodus 6) highly suggest that the minimal overlap would be small enough to allow a faithful transmission on a line dedicated to this.

By contrast, Babylonian with Sumerian tablets have no such family history to back up their chronology on.

II

1:20 Ussher did not guess, but make a choice among possibilities.

Are Genesis 5 and 11 to be read from Masoretic version (with Vulgate, Douay Rheims and King James)?

Long or short stay in Egypt between Joseph and Exodus? All or only second half of the 430 years Abraham was told of?

Some niggling with Judges, with Kings, and after Exile ... some different but not too different versions.

In Roman Martyrology for Christmas Day, Genesis 5 is from LXX, Genesis 11 from either Samarian or LXX without the Second Cainan, and the niggling after Solomon puts him somewhat earlier (it seems to have made a mistake in citing 1032 as anointing of King David instead of 1032 as Temple and 1082 as anointing of King David).

As precise results, but different ones.

III

1:44 6pm on Saturday? I second that.

I'd prefer 1st of September 5199 BC, though.

Lower than the value given by "science"?

By a certain school of scientists, rather!

IV

2:18 78,832 years old - Buffon was obviously following up the equations to the smaller precisions.

What is wrong is his assumption earth started out as a ball of hot metal and then cooled.

It happens to be totally arbitrary and backed up by now evidence.

V

2:38 "Both Ussher and Buffon" ... Ussher was a historian, not a scientist.

As a historian, he expects to get results by adding up recorded years.

So did the earlier Julius Africanus and St. Jerome who contributed via the Historia scholastica to Roman Martyrology of december 25.

I mean, look at the war and peace records in Europe from outbreak of Franco-Prussian war, you add up these figures:

Franco-Prussian war. 6 months, 1 week and 2 days
From FP to WWI. 43 years 6 months
World War I. 4 years, 3 months and 2 weeks
From WWI to WWII. 20 years, three weeks
World war II. 6 years and 1 day
From WWII to now. 75 years 2 weeks, 6 days

As an end result, I would expect "an oddly precise" figure and not a rounded one.

149 years 5 months 4 days

2020 - 149 = 1871
sept - 5 = april
25 - 4 = 21
21 April 1871 - off by a year

VI

3:32 I'll give you a point for admitting you are based on Hutton.

However, I'll deduct quite a lot from him for supposing his process of rock formation was the right one, without giving the Flood of Noah any serious thought.

VII

4:04 Hutton / Kant : posed an infinite cycle.

Epicure needed one because he ruled out God and gods.

Both have in essence, again, attributed "eternity" away from God, to whom it belongs, and onto creation, to which it does not belong.

Plaifair's "giddy" means Hutton's idea had a hypnotic fascination on him.

In Kant's case, there is the question "why would God create then and not one bit earlier or one bit later instead" and there is his presumption that because he didn't know the answer, God wouldn't know it either.

Jack Johnson

You are operating on the assumption that everyone already knows or knew that god existed, when that has yet to be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. They did not attribute eternity to something else, there was nothing there that eternity belonged to in the first place.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Jack Johnson I am operating on the historically correct assumption most people in the days I deal with or decades recently before those were Christians with moderns, Popular Polytheists or Philosophic Theists in the time of Epicure.

Without eternity, you can't have existence. If at any point in the past nothing existed, then nothing could have come into existence since then either.

VIII

4:39 No, not really. We have not known since Copernicus and Galileo that the Earth was just one planet among several, we have collectively thought we knew it since about Kant, Euler and other over-idolaters of Newton.

And your citing astronomers swearing by the Copernican principle is fairly obviously a case of the fallacy "iurare in verba magistri".

Jack Johnson

YES WE HAVE. Are you seriously suggesting that we didn't know that the earth was one planet among several before copernicus and galileo?? There are planets that can be seen with the naked eye, which already makes that statement of yours a piece of fake news.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Jack Johnson Actually, no.

The problem is not with these planets being known.

The problem is whether we knew or even now know that Earth is a simple parallel to them.

How about answering what I am saying, not what you think I am saying? Like, checking grammar and word choice for more precise clues to my meaning than the ones you used?

IX

4:52 Copernican principle as written in the fact square is a dubious statement.

We certainly are observers of the universe, and we certainly seem privileged such. What more privileged position overrides this?

As your spoken words, physical laws may or may not be the same everywhere (we cannot go to alpha Centauri and test the point), but this has nothing to do with the above statement on our observations meant to demote them from certainty without any more certain observations. For the universe to rotate around Earth each day, I do not need physical laws to be different on alpha Centauri, I only need actors on spatial scale of the voluntary type, i e other than attraction or inertia as per mass, other than initial speed, like God and angels, and I also need the speed of light to have a limit in relation to an aether moving around earth rather than in relation to absolute space.

Jack Johnson

We are not "observers of the universe", we are one of the observers of the universe. The laws of physics seem to apply everywhere we have looked so far, so you cannot imply that it is in any way specific to us.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@Jack Johnson Edges of galaxies contradict you : in order for normal physics to apply to "our galaxy" supposing there is such a thing or the Andromeda galaxy (as viewed by standard astronomy), there would need to be lots of dark matter ....

Moreover, we are not one of the observers, we are several of them.

In English "observers of the universe" without adding any "the" first implies grammatically the indefifinite form and therefore does not logically imply us being all of them.

If you meant all of us are a single observer, no way.

X

5:31 "vastly older than geology can determine, vastly larger than we can see"

Like, apart from the hypnotic lure of such a description, where does the "must be" of Lyell come from, and was he taking the astronomic parallel from a given astronomer or from Kant and his imagination as amateur astronomer?

Yes, I know he was very influential on a young scientist called Charles Darwin, and I also know he was the kind of Anglican (or Kirkman?) who said no to Moses ...

5:23 I see a line of men, a bit like I would line up informers between Adam and Moses, between Noah and Moses, between Peleg and Heber and Moses and so on ... but in this case, we do not deal with a series of men handing on a piece of information that the oldest of them knew of and the rest preserved from getting lost. I see a series of men who, in one case believed, in the rest of the cases disbelieved the Bible. And of the latter ones, invented more and more discrepancies from it.

XI

5:47 Yes, exactly, Darwin's idea of evolution needed Lyell.

Any evolution believer could be guilty of wishful thinking in accepting Lyell.

Except, of course, by refuting the Flood of Noah, which AronRa for one tries to do with little success, while most try to ignore the question.

XII

7:41 I am moderately enthusiastic about fossils "in the right order" given that all fossil beds actually are one per rock. Yes, including in Karroo. I am moderately excited about matching that order with radiometric dates, given that with conflicting such, one routinely choses the one matching the geological "timescale" best.

But I am near to scoffing, when I hear "halflife" pronounced with confidence for any one longer than C14. Libby concluded for 5568 years, and when dating found historic data it waschanged to Cambridge halflife, this being 5730 years.

This means, even so short a halflife as C14, you need to confirm with historic data, which simply are lacking for longer ones.

_