Guest Seraph Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 Hi all.... Gotta a couple of questions from an enquiring mind who is, by his own admission, a little bit lost and confused at the mo. Hope you can shed some light. 1 - Equidistant Letter Sequencing in the Old Testament: This was one of the main things that caused me to start examining Christianity when I was 17 years old (I'll be 26 on Monday). I realise that the so-called prophecies of the bible code were actually horse crap, but what of the existence of the code itself; the actual algorithm. Maths being the queen of the sciences, when Eliyahu Rips worked this stuff out, I was blown away; Mathematically prove something is true, and it is. Does anyone know if the algorithmic code still stands, minus all the "lets look to see if it tells me the lottery numbers for Saturdays Euro Millions" stuff? 2 - Flawed Carbon Dating Methods: Regardless of what I end up believing or not believing, I would need some pretty bloody amazing evidence to believe in evolution. Although I have a creative streak, I have an engineers mind, and I cant accept (as yet; this may change) that the millions of eco-systems and sub-systems were the result of a series of statistical probabilities. I know dinosaurs existed, and I did not ever believe in the 6000 year old earth, even at the pinnacle of my faith. My issue is with dating methods, which seem to be inherently flawed, due to the increasing amount of C14 in the atmosphere. Can anyone give some reasons as to why they believe these methods, or, even better, know of more reliable dating schemes? At the moment, I cringe when I hear people giving out dates on TV in this method about as much as I cringe when I think about Kent Hovind. Some nice conclusive evidence either way would be good.... Thanks Tref Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JGJ@ReligionisBullshit Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 It's funny you picked two things that are quite similar in their flaws. Methods of dating and the popular "Codes" found in the Bible. Both can only be certain in their truths when the answer is already known. C14 dating is a relative dating system, along with systems like: Cation Ratios - for rocks with modified surfaces, but not very accurate and relative to environment; Rates of Accumulation - Othewise known as Stratigraphy but usually only good for sites that have been occupied again and again and is common sense when just determining which layer is older in stratified sites; Obsidian Hydration - for stone tools but also relative to the environment; Seriation - which determines a time frame for ceramics but is relative to the culture at hand and you need to have an idea of the methods used by that culture in certain time periods; Pollen Analysis - can only tell what the vegetation of an area was like in the past and can give no dates by itself; there are more but it's been awhile. Dates given by using these systems are not exact, they are huge spaces of time in the thousands to 100's of thousands of years. For C14 dating to be more accurate today we would need to know the amount of C14 in the atmosphere at any given time in Earth's History and what the average amount of C14 was that was ingested for any time period at 6000 year intervals. Since the levels can fluctuate that is quite impossible. Absolute dating systems are more rare. Archaeomagnetism, only goes back 400 years or so because that is how long we have been collecting data on the earth's magnetic field. Tree ring growth (Dendrochronology) is good only for the life of the tree and won't tell us much about any type of civilization dates but can tell us environmental data, including how we have affected it. There are three types of Radiometric dating; thermoluminescence, Electron Spin Resonance, and Optically Stimulated Luminescence which are used for minerals and they have to be kept under strict circumstances to be accurate. Fission Track dating can be used with Potassium Argon Dating to check for validity and is probably the most accurate among those listed so far. Oxidizable Carbon Ratio is still a relatively new method and hasn't been perfected yet. Racemization is as relative as C14 dating and objects being dated are easily contaminated. Uranium-Thorium dating is much like that of Fision Track dating but finding an object that can be dated with this method is very rare since it requires certain conditions to be met. Really it all depends on what it is your trying to date as to which method an archaeologist would request. I'm sure there are more methods, but like I said, it has been awhile since I was a history major going into archaeology and have since changed my major. As far as the Equidistant Letter sequencing goes, I'm not even a novice of it, but I have heard that you can do this type of "predicition of the past code" with any large book. I give it no weight whatsovever since you need to know what you are looking for first in order to find it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thurisaz Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 One can find funny things in da babble by decoding it. That much is true. Of course that goes for Moby Dick, War and Peace, and (I trust) for basically every text of sufficient length too. So how serious should we take the bible codes, if they are really nothing special? (Just for fun, I tried out one of those "free bible decoders" I found on the internet somewhere, and it revealed to me that I'm a prophet! (That is, it found the sequence "(my real life name) prophet"). So, if I tell you that the babble code is bullshit, you better believe it ) As for dating methods, first there are Idon'tknowhowmany different dating methods out there which, for some reason, always show pretty much the same age for the same piece of matter - unless of course a pack of cretinists apply the dating methods wrong intentionally to then point to the result and say "See? It's all junk!". Second, to refer specifically to the radiometric methods, of course they depend on constant decay rates... but then, if decay rates would have fluctuated significantly, we'd find evidence for that pretty much everywhere as those decay rates are a truly fundamental parameter of the universe. Or rather, we wouldn't find that, because we'd never have come into existence. It's similar to that goo' ol' bullshit claim of the cretinists that the speed of light was once one niflheluvatime faster... so that the observed universal distances of billions of lightyears become compatible with their idiotic 6000-year universe model. Unfortunately (for them), Einstein's famous "E = m c^2" incorporates the speed of light too (it's the "c" in the formula). As (among other things) all nuclear reactors and warheads have shown, this formula can indeed be used to determine the ratio of matter-to-energy conversion. I leave it to anyone's imagination what would have happened in the cores of all the stars out there if c would have been, say, a million times greater some millennia ago. Or rather, I'd like to make that clear here. Unfortunately, I'd have to write "BOOM" in a font size of about 3,756 for it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Seraph Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 Wow... Cool info guys... =) Thats a LOT of dating methods.... I have been living in a bubble for soooo long; I really dont know jack anymore concerning science, when at one time I was supposed to be heading for MIT with a severe interest in Physics, Chemistry and technology as a whole. Its incredible about the claim re: the speed of light changing.... That is utter horse shite; its a constant. I've never heard anyone say that before, and its probably a good thing that I didnt; there would have been a rather large argument.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zach Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 Here's a good link for you about radiometric dating. And here's one about the Bible code. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taphophilia Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 Hi Seraph, I went to Christian schools all of my life and was taught Creation science. I know for a fact that what you were told are lies and misrepresentations. Real scientists look at the evidence and form a conclusion based on the evidence. If Creation science and Christianity were true, they would say it's true. They, like us, are seekers of truth and will throw out what what has been demenstrated not to be true. Unlike, Creationists who have a conclution first then fit the evidence around their beliefs. I'm at work right now, so I can't provide a link, but if you google Moby Dick Code, you find that the book Moby Dick also makes preditions the same way the Bible Code does. Taph Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thurisaz Posted March 17, 2006 Share Posted March 17, 2006 Its incredible about the claim re: the speed of light changing.... That is utter horse shite; its a constant. I've never heard anyone say that before, and its probably a good thing that I didnt; there would have been a rather large argument.... Unbelievable nonsense, eh? But believe it or not, I've seen that claim come up by a cornered fundie more than once... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
redneck22 Posted March 19, 2006 Share Posted March 19, 2006 Its incredible about the claim re: the speed of light changing.... That is utter horse shite; its a constant. I've never heard anyone say that before, and its probably a good thing that I didnt; there would have been a rather large argument.... Unbelievable nonsense, eh? But believe it or not, I've seen that claim come up by a cornered fundie more than once... CHALLENGING EINSTEIN WITH "SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY," as reported in The Guardian, 11 Apr 2005, The Age, (Melbourne, Australia) and Cambridge (UK) Evening News 12 Apr 2005. Michael Murphy of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy has told a meeting of physicists at Warwick University that one of the foundational assumptions of Einstein's special theory of relativity, i.e. that the speed of light is unchanging, may be wrong. Ironically the physics conference he was speaking at was specially convened to celebrate Einstein's centenary. Murphy has been working with John Webb of the University of New South Wales (Australia) analysing light from 143 quasars - very distant objects in the universe, whose light has travelled a long way to reach earth. Their conclusions are based on changes in the fine structure constant - a fundamental measurement used to describe how light and matter interact that is linked to the speed of light. This aspect of the research was reported in ScienceNOW (The online news service associated with Journal "Science") 12 April 2005, but their article made no mention of the speed of light. Ekkehard Peik, of the physical -Technical Institute in Braunschweig, Germany commented: "Their result seems to be robust and has survived a number of systematic tests, but the controversy has not been settled." Other astronomers are sceptical, but Murphy believes further studies such as an atomic clock experiment planned by the European space agency for 2006, will confirm his claims. He commented "We are claiming something extraordinary here, and the evidence, though strong, is not extraordinary enough". Ekkehard Peik hopes that Murphy turns out to be right because "it would open a window" to a completely new physics. Cambridge Evening News article: http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/city/...-8ac2-4521-92a0 Guardian article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/sto...1456747,00.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thurisaz Posted March 19, 2006 Share Posted March 19, 2006 Quoting Mr Peik from one article I googled up, dated from 2004: "...weniger als einen Bruchteil von 2 · 10– 15 pro Jahr..." (meaning that any variations in the fundamental constants of nature seem to be less than a fraction of 2 * 10^-15 per year) So, oh well, maybe there's some split-percent of a split-percent of variation... however, as exciting as that would be to a physicist, it wouldn't exactly help the fundies who'd need a variation of at least a million during some few millennia Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSpooky Posted March 19, 2006 Share Posted March 19, 2006 Hi all.... Gotta a couple of questions from an enquiring mind who is, by his own admission, a little bit lost and confused at the mo. Hope you can shed some light. 1 - Equidistant Letter Sequencing in the Old Testament: This was one of the main things that caused me to start examining Christianity when I was 17 years old (I'll be 26 on Monday). I realise that the so-called prophecies of the bible code were actually horse crap, but what of the existence of the code itself; the actual algorithm. Maths being the queen of the sciences, when Eliyahu Rips worked this stuff out, I was blown away; Mathematically prove something is true, and it is. Does anyone know if the algorithmic code still stands, minus all the "lets look to see if it tells me the lottery numbers for Saturdays Euro Millions" stuff? Once you have a large enough body of words to work from, random rearrangement will create some striking patterns. These are assassinations as foretold by Moby Dick. You could believe that Moby Dick is a book of prophecies, along with any other book when butchered enough, but I think it's just far more likely that it's a matter of chance. People tend to equate improbability with impossibility, and that's where people go wrong. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MrSpooky Posted March 19, 2006 Share Posted March 19, 2006 2 - Flawed Carbon Dating Methods: Regardless of what I end up believing or not believing, I would need some pretty bloody amazing evidence to believe in evolution. Although I have a creative streak, I have an engineers mind, and I cant accept (as yet; this may change) that the millions of eco-systems and sub-systems were the result of a series of statistical probabilities. I know dinosaurs existed, and I did not ever believe in the 6000 year old earth, even at the pinnacle of my faith. My issue is with dating methods, which seem to be inherently flawed, due to the increasing amount of C14 in the atmosphere. Can anyone give some reasons as to why they believe these methods, or, even better, know of more reliable dating schemes? At the moment, I cringe when I hear people giving out dates on TV in this method about as much as I cringe when I think about Kent Hovind. People like Kent Hovind tend to wholly misrepresent how radiometric dating works. Carbon dating works because Carbon-14 is produced in a more or less constant rate by radioactive chemistry in the upper atmosphere from Nitrogen. Variations are cross-checked with tree ring samples, if I recall. Carbon-14 then becomes incorporated in plants, which works its way up the food chain into humans and other animals. When we die, we have a certain set amount of C-14 that decays and we measure that ratio to see how old the specimen is. Now there's three problems with C-14 dating that I know of that Creationists will capitalize on: 1. You CAN'T C-14 date aquatic critters. Things that have a food chain derived from the ocean get their carbon from sources like dissolved limestone and this mucks up the C-14 ratios. Much, much more "old carbon" gets into the a clam or seal than C-14. Notice that all the examples that Hovind and Pals provides are clams and seals. 2. Thanks to the burning of fossil fuels and nuclear testing, humans in the last 50 years have tossed up so much "old carbon" into the atmosphere that the system is now hopelessly mucked up with an excess of C-12. It'd take a lot of major fine-tuning to date very recent critters. 3. You can't date extremely old things, like dinosaur fossils because C-14 has a very young half-life (6000 years abouts). After 30,000 years or so C-14 ratios are so small that it's just about impossible to get an accurate date. So carbon dating works, it just has to be applied right. You don't use a hammer to pound in a screw, and you don't use C-14 dating to date things that are aquatic in nature, too recent, or too old. Oh an addition as to how Uranium dating works, quoted from Wikipedia (emphasis added)... The uranium-lead radiometric dating scheme is one of the oldest available, as well as one of the most highly respected. It has been refined to the point that the error in dates of rocks about three billion years old is no more than two million years. Uranium-lead dating is usually performed on the mineral "zircon" (ZrSiO4), though it can be used on other materials. Zircon incorporates uranium atoms into its crystalline structure as substitutes for zirconium, but strongly rejects lead. It has a very high blocking temperature, is resistant to mechanical weathering and is very chemically inert. Zircon also forms multiple crystal layers during metamorphic events, which each may record an isotopic age of the event. These can be dated by a SHRIMP ion microprobe. One of its great advantages is that any sample provides two clocks, one based on uranium-235's decay to lead-207 with a half-life of about 700 million years, and one based on uranium-238's decay to lead-206 with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years, providing a built-in crosscheck that allows accurate determination of the age of the sample even if some of the lead has been lost. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Poonis Posted April 5, 2006 Share Posted April 5, 2006 Once you have a large enough body of words to work from, random rearrangement will create some striking patterns. These are assassinations as foretold by Moby Dick. You could believe that Moby Dick is a book of prophecies, along with any other book when butchered enough, but I think it's just far more likely that it's a matter of chance. People tend to equate improbability with impossibility, and that's where people go wrong. http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/moby.html Isn't amazing, too, that such codes are found in English? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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