Re: The savage athiest evil of uranium

bimms@xxxxxxxx wrote:

Because of your claim that there are multiple possible ages for any
sample, given the sinusoidal nature of "the curve". This claim makes no
sense, and shows you don't understand something very important. I may
have mistaken what it is you don't understand.


I wish I could draw a graph here. But I can't so I will try a verbal
description.

Lets say the carbon level was very high a million years ago. And lets
say the carbon level is very low a thousand years ago. Don't you see
that both could exponentially decay to the same exact level at the
present time?

Yes, in theory, if the variation in carbon levels were sufficient. But
the variation is nowhere near enough for that. The variation is
sufficient to cause errors of a few percent. No more.

I should point out that carbon dating is not capable of going back a
million years. Let's pretend you said "ten thousand" instead.

The extended length of time for the million years would make the
carbon decay to the exact level that you measured in the much younger
specimen. Thus you could have a million year old specimen right next
to a thousand year old specimen, and both would have the exact same
amount of carbon in them? In this scenario, there would simply be NO
WAY to use carbon dating to figure out which was older, because they
would have the EXACT SAME AMOUNT.

In sum, the only way radiometric dating works is when the atmospheric
level of a given element is very uniform. Which is precisely why K-
argon dating is so good, and carbon dating is so incredibly bad.

This is correct if the variation in atmospheric C14 abundance is
unreasonably large. If the variation is small, the effect is small. And
so it is.

That's a non sequitur. The abundance curve doesn't cause there to be
multiple solutions. Why would you think so?

Because it DOES cause multiple solutions. There is no way around this.
It simply DOES SO, like it or not.

I can see that you might indeed be a math major. The mere fact that it's
theoretically possible for an exponential curve to intersect an
irregular curve in more than one place is enough to invalidate the
method for you, and you don't have to look at any actual parameters to
see if the effect is significant. A statistics major you are not.

huge enough amount, you would be right for extremely recent dates. But
it doesn't, and you aren't. All that curve does is increase the error in
dates that are not corrected. But it doesn't increase error by very
much, and certainly not by enough to render your timetable credible.

It increases error for dates that are not corrected, and this
correction is based on dendrochronology, which not only has its own
problems of possible false ring correlations, but also only goes back
a few thousand years.

Are we now agreed that it goes back much more than 6000 years? And can
we agree that the error is not enough to save your 6000-year history of
humanity?

As for error increasing "very much," since we don't have
dendrochronology going back very far, that means we could have huge
carbon fluctuations that would render virtually all the carbon dating
invalid.

This might be theoretically possible, though in fact I doubt there's a
physical mechanism that could cause the sorts of fluctuations you
require. But do you have any reason to believe fluctuations of that
magnitude have happened? Or do you just assume them because it fits your
beliefs?

Note that your beliefs aren't salvageable anyway, because there are
other methods capable of dating human artifacts and remains.

Carbon is simply a very tenuous way to measure dates. Get
back to me when we have something as reliable as k-argon dating for
inorganics.

Why? You would only reject that too, because it doesn't fit your beliefs.

Sorry, I meant "if you know only the C14 abundance". What you need to
get a date is ratio of C14 to C12 in the sample. If you don't correct
for changes in atmospheric abundance that date will be slightly wrong.
Big deal.

It could be MUCH MORE than slightly wrong. What if carbon levels
fluctuated wildly in the past? There is no way for us to tell, without
dendrochronology going back very far.

Dendrochronology goes back far enough to falsify your 6000-year claim.
There are other ways to date human artifacts. So all this is moot, even
if your complaints were valid.

Ah, so you are claiming some special knowledge. How exactly does your
vast expertise in mathematics tell you that tree rings can't be correlated?

They CAN be correlated. But when you are dealing with thousands of
tree rings on a very old tree, they are so thin that it is very tough
to correlate them, whereas if you are dealing with hundreds of tree
rings on a younger tree, you have to overlap so many trees that you
could very easily get a false correlation. Damned if you do, damned if
you don't.

No matter which way you try to slice it, it ain't pretty. It's like
dad at thanksgiving, who is automatically expected to have an innate
turkey slicing ability, which gets disproved at every thanksgiving
meal.

There seems to be a pattern here: everything that might disprove your
personal notions of history is invalid, and you know that despite
complete ignorance of the subject.

Dodging the point, I see. Do you think that biblical literalism is
synonymous with Christianity, and that those who claim to be Christians
but not literalists are not really Christians?

Of course not. But the Bible is for the most part, literally true. But
salvation is not dependent on believing the whole thing, although that
is the best scenario.

I wish you wouldn't snip all context. Not everyone is reading this in
Google groups. But if you will look back you will see that this
admission invalidates the point you were originally making.

Nonsense. That's only true if civilization is based on Christianity. And
you are wrong about that.

Western Civ is based on Christianity. This is a historical fact. About
2 millenia of Christianity, if you want to know.

Nonsense. It's certainly been strongly influence by Christianity. But
Christianity was in turn strongly influenced by previous civilization.
Western civilization is based on everything that came before.

Well, according to you every person who has ever lived except True
Christians (forget those fake Christians who aren't literalists, like
Augustine) was living on lies.

I never said they were fake Christians. You are putting words in my
mouth. They will still make it to heaven.... come to think of it,
EVERYONE makes it to heaven eventually, so you are definitely barking
up the wrong tree here.

Really? So you're a heretic? But whatever do you mean? Are you equating
"making it to heaven" with "not living on lies"? You're not making any
sense, even if (especially if) we restore the context.

admit that a great many people believe things that ain't so. Do you
disagree? And if you agree, so what?

The difference is that those who attack Christianity are attacking the
very root of Western Civ. Biting the hand that feeds you is an
understatement here.

Once again, you are equating Christianity with biblical literalism, only
a few lines after denying that you do. Do you even notice stuff like that?

There seem to be a few steps missing in your proof.

I've elaborated on this proof before, no need to constantly outline
the whole thing.

Of course you have.

Believe anything you like. It seems to me, though, that the dominance of
the west is due to science, not Christianity. (And to the accident that
China decided in the 16th Century to isolate itself from the rest of the
world.) You may claim that science was caused by Christianity, but that
argument is mighty thin.

1. If Christianity did not cause science, why did not Buddhist, Hindu,
or Islamic societies invent science in a nice parallel fashion?

If [insert random feature unique to Europe] didn't cause science, why
didn't [insert random non-European region] invent science in a nice
parallel fashion]? I say that the cause of science wasn't Christianity,
but feudalism. It's just as valid as your claim.

If Christianity caused science, why didn't Armenian and Coptic
Christians invent science?

2. Each non-Christian religion had certain fundamental ideas that are
contrary to science.

No more or less so than Christianity.

3. In Buddhism, the external world supposedly does not exist, wo why
study it scientifically?

4. In Hinduism, the external world is suposedly part of God, and you
can't study God like a scientific object.

5. In Islam, the idea of God was so simple that it did not allow for
complexity. Everything was supposedly so simple. No need to study
things in all their scientific complexity. Just sharpen your sword and
conquer a new land for Allah!

This is all nonsense. People with these religions may not have invented
science, but they certainly studied the world and made important
discoveries. One can in fact argue that the invention of science in
Europe was based on reading Arabic scholarship that transmitted the
accumulated wisdom of India and China.

And Archimedes invented the basics of science long before Christianity.
Apparently the world wasn't ready.

6. In Christianity, the idea of the complexity of God (Trinity) made
everything very complicated, as did so much else in Christian
Theology. This un-escapable complexity is what allowed Christian
societies to be open to the idea that the truth might not be simple.
Thus, the massive complexity of science was not completely alien to
the dominant Christian culture. Of course, science is both enormously
complex and also elegantly simple..... exactly like God and the
Trinity. Trinitarian Theology was thus absolutely essential to get
Westerners used to the idea that truth is complicated, which is highly
compatible with the continuous self-correction that we find in
science.

This is all nonsense. I can't imagine how you would come up with any
evidence to support your claim. It's fascinating how the incredible
complexity of the Hindu pantheon didn't give India an even greater
notion of complicated truth. But when you're pulling the truth out of
your ass, as you do here, reason just gets in the way.

.

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