Pat Robertson Denies Young Earth Creationism: My Take
I think Pat Robertson is a shitbag. Always have. But he’s an influential shitbag and this is just plain old good progress, particularly when you consider The 10 Stupidest Things Pat Robertson Ever Said.
Unlike all the other vids I saw of this, this one actually has the viewer question he was responding to. And that’s the other bright light, here. First, take a look, about a minute & a half.
Here’s one of the better items of the reportage I found, CNN of all places. As to that other bright spot, the really important thing, if you ask me, is:
“If you fight science, you are going to lose your children, and I believe in telling them the way it was,” Robertson concluded.
That’s a prima facie admission that science trumps the Bible when in direct conflict and that’s huge when you think of the implications of that. Now of course, “telling them like it is” only really means that when the scientific evidence is so overwhelming, they’ll have to come along, kicking and screaming if need be. But it’s progress. America lags so far behind the modern world in all of this I’ll take what I can get.
With the Internet, this is only going to get worse for Biblical literalists. Way worse, way fast, and accelerating. I follow various atheist stuff around the Interwebs and in addition to the ever trending up term ‘aheist’ (…so the “new-atheist” books a few years back weren’t just a flash in the pan), most of what I see are young people “coming out,” writing of their experiences with family and friends.
Then there’s this new initiative: Kids Without God.
Welcome to Kids Without God, a site for the millions of young people around the world who have embraced science, rejected superstition, and are dedicated to being Good Without A God!
Yep, no god required to be a good person, and it’s not crazy to consider that basic morality will become more important and more meaningful in the absence of such authority. It certainly did for me.
Call me very pleased about all of this. After all, it’s for the children. 🙂
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If someone, anyone, needs a higher power, government, laws, doctrines etc.. telling them how they should live and act then I want nothing to do with them. They are immoral ass-holes. A person that knows what’s right from wrong and acts upon that knowledge accordingly is a friend in deed.
Morality can not be taught. Either you are a good person or suffer some abberation.
It would be cool if the earth were only 6000 years old, but it isn’t. It would also be cool if evolution was exactly like ‘they’ say it is–things morphing into better things like on Discovery. Why does there only have to be two choices?
I think the correct diet will end up being somewhere in between Vegan and Paleo and how the world really came into being and we evolved is somewhere in between young earth creationist views and evolutionary views. Or, concerning diet, religion, and evolution…we are WAAAAY off on all.
So many mysteries!
We won’t know if we are right about our diet until we live to 150 without butt cancer and we won’t know if we’re right about religion until we are dead or the flying spaghetti monster makes a public service announcement.
The skeptic’s annotated bible is a wonderful thing. Thank you internet.
Also, what kind of omnipotent god would leave fossils lying around on a 6000 year old planet. Does he just like to fuck with people? If that’s the god people are worshipping, that god is a dick.
From this (I mean the other) side of the pond it’s always interesting to see that such discussions/fights even exist.
There is not so many countries in the world where people really talk about how Darwin got it all wrong.
The usual european just simply accepts that Darwin was (more or less) right and that the Bible is a very old book of hundreds of stories from hundreds of authors who tried to explain the world.
Were the writers clever? Yes.
Were they right? Nope.
Is the book still exceptionally important in our lives? Yes.
Is it the work of a higher power? No.
Did Jesus exist? (Most probably) yes.
Was he exceptional? Yes.
Was he the son of god? Meh, that depends on your believes..
Does it have anything to do with Darwin? No.
Thanks for that perspective. It sums up my view fairly well.
I am not a Biblical literalist. I take the Thomist view that, aside from the books of history and law where there exist other sources to verify accounts of events, much of the Bible is metaphor and parable, because sometimes abstract concepts need to be communicated thusly in order for people to understand them. And, of course, Catholics are comfortable with the idea of evolution as the mechanism through which creation perpetuates itself in iterative fashion.
I think people often confuse evolution with the origins of life on earth. Does evolution occur? Yes, there are examples of speciation for which we have evidence. What we don’t know (we can guess) and perhaps may never, ever prove is the theory of chemoevolution. None of us was there when the first RNA was encapsulated in a simple membrane and began to synthesize food and copies of itself. What was the spark? God? Solar radiation? The right combination of temperature and light and moisture? God, again? – same thing? No one knows. It’s a tiresome debate to have with true believers in creationism. I accept that there will be things about the origins of life I will never know and I am comfortable with that, but I also know what the archaeological record shows and what contemporary observations of speciation due to selection pressure and genetic mutation, so I am comfortable believing in evolution as well.
“What we don’t know (we can guess) and perhaps may never, ever prove is the theory of chemoevolution. None of us was there when the first RNA was encapsulated in a simple membrane and began to synthesize food and copies of itself. What was the spark? God? Solar radiation? The right combination of temperature and light and moisture? God, again? – same thing?”
====
I think a lot of people just have trouble with math. It has been about 2,000 years since Christianity began, the earth is 4.5 billion years old. The earth is one of billions or more planets in our universe, and ours may be one of billions of universes, so that spark of life was inevitable somewhere, we find it remarkable because we happen to exist on a planet on which the spark occurred.
So we are dealing with really big numbers, and when you are dealing with really big numbers it is a certainty that the highly improbable event will not only happen once, but repeatedly.
It is also inevitable that the spark has, during the age of our universe, occurred on other planets, the odds against ours being the only planet on which it occurred are humongous, maybe 209,909,282,288,190 to 1.
You take 1,000,000,000 planets that have the elements necessary for life, age the planets for several billion years, and it is a certainty that life will happen on at least a few of them. The miracle is not that life happened, the miracle would be if life DIDN’T happen.
We don’t need god to explain life on earth, all we need is math.
Numbers can be difficult, some people find it hard to keep a mental calculation of the calories they consume on any given day.
The existence of a historical Jesus is a myth! There was absolutely no historical evidence that Jesus, Joseph or Mary ever existed, let alone that Joseph was a carpenter or that Jesus was born in Bethlehem and lived in Nazareth.
There are numerous pieces of evidence but for starters notice that not a single contemporary writer at the alleged time of Jesus’ existence that mentions him.
A man performs miraculous feats but goes unnoticed? Ca’mon man!
I have never looked into it, but since I was a kid all the fundies were all over Josephus as an on-scene historian who documented some aspects of his life.
But it doesn’t matter, because there are hundreds of accounts of messiah claims, since it was a Jewish prophesy and charlatans are eternal.
Josephus’ short accounts of Jesus (in Antiquities) came from interpolations perpetrated by a later Church father (most likely, Eusebius), Josephus’ birth in 37 C.E. (well after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus), puts him out of range of an eyewitness account. Moreover, he wrote Antiquities in 93 C.E., after the first gospels got written! Therefore, even if his accounts about Jesus came from his hand, his information could only serve as hearsay.
Bookmarked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
At first glance, since it is Wikipedia, I want to glance at the references of all the scholars cited. It’s always amused me. What is a scholar of delusion, anyway, unless it’s to be a true scholar of the fact and circumstance of delusion.
i dont’ even believe that Yeshua/Jesus event existed as a “historical” person.
what i mean is his historicity is nil.
so an itinerary teacher probably existed, ditto his apostles; as much as King Arthur & his knights existed. they are all shadowy figures.
RE “no god required to be a good person”:
My sister (another atheist) has a 15 yo daughter who often visits our niece’s family – a Christian-centric nice family. Sis’s boss’s family is atheist and also very nice as well as interesting. The 15 yo has learned by the example of these two families that a lack of belief has nothing to do with a lack of kindness and morality.
Being what I think is a responsible parent, my sister is leaving it up to her daughter to determine her own beliefs or lack thereof. (Heaven forbid, my niece becomes a Catholic as my own daughter did when she was 13! Of course, I blame her “nasty” step-mom for that influence…and a dad who forgot we decided religion would definitely not be part of our lives when our child was young.)
When Carlin first started brutally mocking religion in the early nineties, it was very edgy. He was the first “mainstream” comedian or otherwise to do that. Twenty years later it has become trendy–and boring as hell as far as I’m concerned. South Park nailed it when they did that future dystopia where atheism was the theocracy, and I was surprised that Dawkins didn’t see or refuse to acknowledge their point.
Do I think atheism itself is a religion? No, not at all. But it can take the form of religious fervor the same way liberalism or conservatism or feminism or whatever else can. Perhaps it’s because I’m never exposed to proselytizers or really come into conflict with family members who are True Believers, but especially now that Hitch is gone, it’s really starting to seem like beating a dead horse. I had to stop following Ricky Gervais on Twitter because he was doing like 50 tweets a day arguing with religious trolls.
Null hypothesis, Russel’s teapot, blah blah, yeah I get it already. It’s a fucking mythology.
And frankly, I can’t even get worked up about the teaching of ID in public schools. Fuck it, let them teach it. Who cares? When I think of all mediocre to downright shitty math and science teachers I had (with some very notable exceptions) I think the last thing parents need to worry about is someone teaching an alternative fairy tale to evolution. I still remember arguing with a physics teacher about the acceleration vector for uniform circular motion. It points towards the center, of course, but the centripetal force is felt in the opposite direction. That bonehead had it turned around. Then there was the calculus teacher who had had only one semester of calculus and obviously not really understood it. I was no child prodigy, but I knew back then that there was something deeply flawed about that system. So fuck it, throw in intelligent design, what’s that going to do? Hold back a generation of American Nobel Prize winners in medicine? Not! Bloody! Likely!
I also find it ironic that this has become a Team Blue rallying cry. So many of these pearl-clutching liberals who are up in arms about the desecration of the Holy Public School System are themselves products of this system’s shitty math and science. Except, unlike me, they didn’t make up for it in college with a STEM degree or with some sort of autodidactics. Most of these folks would be hard pressed to explain how straightforward Mendelian inheritance works, or the basic ideas of Darwin but ohmigod, the childrenz are going to be brainwashed by the evul Christian nazis. This goes double for the journalists who cover this stuff.
All that being said, Pat Robertson is indeed a shitbag of the highest order.
Also, I’d like to give a big shoutout to my 9th grade Civics teacher who first exposed me to logical fallacies, way, way back before every dipshit on the internet thought he was being clever by yelling “Strawman!” every time someone disagreed with him. I did learn a few useful things in public school, some of those things were even intended to be taught by the teachers.
What the hell, Sean?
So let me get this straight. Because there are some crappy math and science teachers out there, let’s not promote doing better at that, but instead make things worse.
Mkay.
I do agree with the tediousness of some of the atheism crowd, like the activists who fight against nativity scenes in the public square, etc. I followed Gervais on Twitter for only a few days, unfollowed for the same reason. I like ridiculing the ridiculous as much as the next guy but he’s a one trick pony now. The one who takes the best approach in my view in Penn Jillette. He limits his ridicule to the charlatans and explicitly acknowledges the goodness in the heart of religious people, even fundies. I identify with this because I grew up in it and still know a lot of ’em, even family members and get along fine with them.
Just a couple of weeks ago I got a FB request on my personal FB (which I limit to only those I have met in person and know as more than mere acquaintance) from a church lady from way back. She’s just as kooky as ever, mentions her Lord in virtually every communiqué. But she’s read a lot of my blog and assures me she’s not offended. We’ve had a number of exchanges and consider each other friends. And as to the vulgarity, not her cup of tea but she is familiar with Martin Luther and Mark Twain.
Things have changed. You might say that I’m just encouraging the evolution.
It’s not some science and math teachers are crappy, it’s that occasionally a decent math or science teacher makes it into the system before getting chewed up. The system is deeply, deeply, deeply flawed. Adding in ID is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
Teachers have to take a bunch of BS education classes and then a few classes in the field. My mother couldn’t break into teaching home ec so she got qualified to teach science. She did this by taking a bunch of easy biology classes, but she also had to take a single hard science class, chem 101. She spent an entire semester making that class her full time job. Got a D and had to take it again. She’s not scientifically inclined, to say the least. But it worked, she got in as a science teacher and after a few years was able to switch over to home ec which she taught for many years. Yes she’s my mom, but I don’t think she was a stellar or inspiring science teacher.
The point is that public school system (guild) requires people who’ve jumped through all their bullshit hoops first and foremost, being qualified in the field is a secondary consideration. The system itself chews up people who are intelligent and qualified, like any government bureaucracy. I’ve known a couple of quite good math teachers who quit in disgust, one of them refused to take a bullshit reading refresher seminar that was required of all, ‘why don’t reading teachers have to take a math seminar?’
The system is fucked from top to bottom, completely fucked up. The people who do best in it are those willing to play the stupid game, jump through the mindless hoops, plow through the idiotic banality of it all. In other words the banal themselves who helped create and propagate the system in the first place. Sure, there are some bright intelligent people, and maybe even a few who stick with it and don’t get chewed up, but those people are beating very long odds.
And the people who are self-righteously up in arms about ID are completely oblivious about these entrenched problems of this decadent system. If only more money was shoveled into this white elephant it all could be fixed. Like I said, the majority of these valiant pearl-clutching defenders of evolution would be hard pressed to describe its basic tenets, thanks to their own public school education. All they know is that they bathe in the glorious light that is Team Blue.
Fix the huge, tragic and deeply entrenched problems with the public school system and then get back to me about ID.
Agree with you about Penn Jillette.
Sean, I spent three years of my life as a starry-eyed public school teacher. I thought I could change things, be the teacher for which I yearned in all my youthful years, and thrive. I was so, so wrong, and for the very reasons you point out.
The system does not truly desire teachers of fact, grammar, discipline, science, and truth. It desires those who have embraced the liberal doctrines of large-scale egalitarianism, large-scale multiculturalism, feminism, Marxism, and just-enough math to balance a checkbook. Question the system and you don’t get tenure. Luckily, I was able to leave (OK, I was fired, for racism of all things, because of issues I asked my students to consider while teaching the mandated text Huckleberry Finn) my last job and retire to my modest homestead to raise my babies and be a proper wife to my hardworking husband. I’m not shy about my pride in this situation.
Education in America is a joke beyond the 6th or 7th grade level. Even before those years the quantity of liberal indoctrination is suspect. Worshiping the state as the provider of all solutions is at the core of all curricula, hating whiteness and fostering a fractured view of society via multiculturalism and neutral to negative views of native culture is paramount to the definition of a “good education.”
I don’t want to be a part of such a system.
“The system does not truly desire teachers of fact, grammar, discipline, science, and truth. …”
True enough, on the large. In Beatrice’s case, somewhere even before I met her she got identified as an outlier—people at the district called her Beafa (Beatrice Fabela), and she always gets what she wants. Every. Time. She never gave a shit about anything but her kids, but when really true to that and you can manage to engage them…
Bea laughs at a lot of stuff. Kids want to learn stuff. You have to figure out how to interest them in the endeavor.
The project she’s in now is a California experiment. Her principle is a brand new principle, fellow teacher over many years. “Fuck the tests,” he always tells her. “We have 3 years dispensation. Let’s make it or break it.”
It’s a tiny candle in a hurricane, but I can’t help but be a fan, sitting here with a front row seat.
That said, Amy, I have no doubt you’d fit in with what Bea is doing and it’s unfortunate more people like you don’t get the opportunity.
Amy, I hear you. My father has a degree in math education along with civil engineering. After he shutdown his computer business in his 50s he got a job teaching math at a lower income high school. He also had idealistic ideas that were quickly shattered, he lasted about 6 weeks if I recall.
The cholo guys would saunter into class late with their gang jackets and the girls would whoop and holler and there was nothing my father could do to restore order. Despite experiences like this and the fact that they sent my younger sister to a private high school, even though my mother was a public school teacher, they remain diehard liberals. It’s all about being on the right team for most people, unfortunately.
You are right, 7th 8th grade is when public school education becomes meaningless. The system attracts and rewards mediocrity, but one doesn’t need to be a genius to teach handwriting or basic arithmetic. It’s at the high school level that the students begin to require someone with actual in-depth knowledge and this is where the Procrustean bed of mediocrity really takes its toll.
Glad you got out, but it’s indicative of the ongoing tragedy that you had to.
“Adding in ID is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
Not by a long shot. Any cutthroat worth a shit would know exactly what ID represents. But they counted on pussies. So far, they were right.
LOVE the story of your mom. Hits home. All Beatrice ever wanted to do was teach kids. When she was still a kid, she even set up a classroom in her parent’s garage—desks, chairs, kit, caboodle. She charged neighborhood kids 50 cents per lesson. She’s finishing her 30th year this year, in her original school she spent her fist 16 years in, because it went to shit and they reassigned everyone (they don’t fire even the stinkiest shit…part of the problem) and brought in a new principle, Beatrice, a bunch of other superstar teachers. They’re bringing it back. It’s 90% mexican and asian immigrant, huge percentage of kids illiterate in their own native language.
Tough job, she’s exhausted every night, but you couldn’t tear it away from her if you tried.
Now do you get it?
What am supposed to have gotten? California has some of the highest taxes and worst schools in the country. The system is inherently flawed, education beyond 7th or 8th is a joke as Amy says, but we should all be concerned about whether or not evolution is properly taught?
Despite whatever amazing charter school program Bea is engaged in, CA is basically a long-running textbook example of how to fuck up education.
Hell, they can barely teach a non-controversial 2000 year old subject like Euclidean geometry properly, but you are worried about ID? This is culture war bullshit, and I think it’s a personal bugaboo with you because of your upbringing. ID is ridiculous, but it’s a pimple on a gnat’s ass compared to the real systemic failures.
Also, one of the few good teachers I had was a ninth grade English (or liberal arts or something) teacher. First of all it was a guy, and a guy who commanded respect, coached the track team, was in great shape, still had his 50s flat-top.
But the guy was quite sharp. We spent two weeks learning the famous soliloquy from Macbeth, and I still know it to this day. Why? Because he spent a single class period discussing every line, and these lines came alive, were now fraught with meaning.
This teacher was also a communist. Literally. He would talk about how communism is a good idea but it’s never been tried and how he got into trouble once for saying communism is a good thing when a parent heard about it and complained to admin.
Was my fragile little mind destroyed by this? Am I now a shill for communism thanks to this teacher? No. Would I have exchanged this teacher for a typical mediocrity who was phoning it in? No fucking way.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out out, brief candle!
Kids are way, way better off with an intelligent teacher who was forced to teach ID alongside evolution than they are with the typical teacher who fits into this deeply flawed system.
“What am supposed to have gotten?”
One mind at a time.
Absolutely zero of anything I talk about in this realm has anything to do with public policy. I’m an anarchist. Everything I do is aimed at individual minds, particularly those in a position to influence other minds, including children.
You are an ‘anarchist’ who refuses to address my points beyond talking about your wife teaching in a charter school.
BULLSHIT, Sean.
As an anarchist, my wife runs her own fucking life, OK? We don’t even have a joint bank account and her CCs are in her name and mine in mine.
OK, I get it. You don’t give a shit about individuals who give a shit about individual kids.
I don’t adress your points because they are NON-SEQUITUR and I generally ignore non-sequitur. I already threw you a bone to imply to you that they were non-sequitur but your sciency brain didn’t seem to grasp it.
You are interested in systems of hierarchy and imposing or letting them go to shit, neither of which I give a runny shit about.
I give a huge & healthy shit about individuals influencing individuals or small groups of individuals, within the context of an imposed hierarchy or without.
Jesus Christ, already.
I thought I just read that you didn’t like to talk about bowel movements.
hmmmmm 😉
Sean, I feel like your points are pre-addressed. Publicly funded education isn’t “broken”. The entire concept is fatally flawed.
You got kids? Congratulations! It’s YOUR responsibility to get them educated.
I’ll admit that there are some (very few) things to like about public education, but to think that you can pull a lever here or twist a knob there and “fix” it is even more Pollyanna than I am. (and I’m a TOTAL sucker)
You got me, Joshua. OK, then, I don’t like to talk about literal ones, because it dilutes the power of my metaphorical ones.
Mkay?
Let me see if I have this straight: teaching ID in public schools is a tragedy of epic proportions because your wife is a heroic teacher, and you are all butthurt because I write in non-sequiturs.
Also you are a fucking hero because you care about individuals and I am evil because I don’t share your perfectly enlightened belief system.
And my brain is not clever enough to pick up the subtle bones you throw out.
Jesus Christ yourself.
Sean
Please show me in the post where I talked about ID or the public schools.
You’re really arguing against fundamentalist hyperliteralism, which is a pretty darned small (if loud & obnoxious) minority of Christians. I’ve always felt it’s silly to think that your religious ideas could possibly be right while flying in the face of science. Hint: if your method of interpreting scripture leads you to deny scientific facts, you’re doing it wrong….
Minority of Christians sure, but still numbering in the tens of millions. And politically active. Huckabee is a young Earth creationist, as is Rick Perry, and probably others.
Somewhere around 40-45% of all Americans believe in young Earth creationism, and 60% of Republicans. We’re over 100 million right there. Support for evolution in America is the lowest of all industrialized nations. Broken down by religion, Muslims support evolution to a greater degree than evangelical christians. Buddhists win at over 80%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Level_of_support_for_evolution
However, speaking of naked … there is a way for the modern man to load up on sun in the extra-speedy manner that suits today’s hectic life. See, what really needs the sunlight the most is a man’s dick. Skipping all that “modesty” and “pants” horse crap and exposing male genitals to direct sunlight is said to increase testosterone levels by a neat 200 percent.
Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_20133_5-reasons-modern-life-driving-manliness-to-extinction.html#ixzz2E5bKLQf0
Food for thought …
Good article. He must be slipping in his old age.
I don’t trust Pat Robertson, or any other televangalist, but I am a Bible believing Christian. I do believe in a young Earth. I also believe in science and all the wonderful things that it’s taught us.
It will be a sad day indeed if something like Kids Without God gains any momentum. I don’t know any Christians who call for the end of athiests. People are encouraged to question and choose for themselves. If someone chooses to deny God, that’s their choice. If I choose to embrace Jesus and believe in that “book of Fairy Tales”, why can’t I? I don’t interfer with anyone’s life.
It’s funny, if a Christian disagrees with someone’s “evolutionary” stand, the Christian is automatically “against science”.
Still, if you believe in evolution, teach your children. If you believe in Creationism, then teach your children that. We all don’t have to agree.
“If I choose to embrace Jesus and believe in that “book of Fairy Tales”, why can’t I? I don’t interfer with anyone’s life.”
Setting aside the fact that in the next paragraph, you admonish people to cripple (my characterization) their children with a “book of Fairy Tales” in a world that increasingly rejects them, I have no problem with that.
At the same time, if 100 million people are going around asserting that 2+2=5, but nonetheless “not hurting anyone,” I do nonetheless feel a human obligation to speak out against.
I don’t see evolution and natural selection as something I believe in, I see it as a logical conclusion.
I don’t really care what other people believe in or what their children are taught (or if they are taught at all, you can make them serve as little midget gladiators in an arena for all I care).
But evolution and natural selections are not things that are subject to belief or disbelief, just as the fact that the earth travels around the sun is not subject to belief or disbelief.
“I don’t see evolution and natural selection as something I believe in, I see it as a logical conclusion.”
Thank you. I bristle when I see “believe” in that context.
It’s like: I believe that 1+1=2.
Me: You mean you don’t _know_?
Can’t carbon dating and the christians just get along?
NO, because those “fundamentalist” christians that have a problem with ‘carbon dating’ are people who are either fundamentally dishonest or else people who are parroting dishonest propaganda in their ignorance.
.
You can’t get along with liars or with their willfully ignorant followers.
.
The dishonest argument is that hey, the age of the earth is Estimated from meteorites, so of course the earth could be a lot younger and these meteorites landed on here later.
This is Absolutely true, the Oldest estimate of the age of the earth is from meteorites and from dating the age of the solar system, putting earth’s age at around 4.5 billion years.
.
What they neglect to say is that every continent on earth has been found to have regular earth rocks, crystals and sediments that are between 3.5 billion years (youngest) to 4.03 billion years (oldest, in Canada). Definitely nowhere near the 6,000 or so years of the bible story.
Since these rocks and sediments are in lava flows and river beds, this means earth is even older than the already Billions of years in age measured from earth rocks (volcano or river already formed prior) and the very oldest rocks/sediments may have disintegrated, so use space rocks and the dating of the solar system for absolute oldest values.
Either way, we’re talking Billions of years, not a few thousand.
.
If that dishonesty wasn’t enough, the internal inconsistency of claiming that the bible can still be right because the (oldest) age is estimated from space rocks doesn’t seem to hit them. That is, if the whole universe formed in 7 days, well, the meteorites and solar system must be same age so who cares if using space rocks.
.
If that dishonesty and that inconsistency weren’t enough, there’s the claim that carbon dating is ‘inaccurate’. Better yet, “any scientist will admit that”.
Yup, they sure will….when trying to date organic material.
Carbon dating has absolutely Nothing to do with dating the age of the earth, but the propaganda is so strong it’s become part of everyone’s vocabulary.
The half-life of the Carbon isotope that is used for (other kinds of) dating is only a few thousand years, so useless for something as old as the earth.
The age of the earth is determined by lead and uranium decays and with an accuracy of 1%. Sure, it’s an “Estimate”, but one that means that instead of 4.5 billion years it could be as young as (4.5 billion – 0.045 billion) = 4.455 billion years old.
.
However, they’d need basic math to see that and some familiarity with logical deduction. So I agree Very Much with Sean that teaching ID or not is a NIT compared to the abject failure of science and math education in this country.
“However, they’d need basic math”
I was waiting, waiting, waiting to show you you’d tossed pearls before swine, and I had to read your whole comment to find it.
🙂
laf 😉
And just for that, here’s Ricky Gervais (NOT in a tweet!) : rumors and…. the Bible compared to a Maths book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9YzOkxB-Gc
Yep, good one. Saw it before but just as funny. I can’t help it. Unlike Sean, I think ridiculing the ridiculous is funny, even though I got an A in calculus.
Can’t potassium-argon dating and the christians just get along?……
Lol. Sorry Rodney Blahblah, that’s still No.
[…] It always comes back to evolution and the subtile science behind it; science grasped by few…and it must be said that many LCers retain the LC moniker and only court Paleo because they just can't identify themselves as evolutionists (yea, I admit: a huge problem unto itself). Remember, 40-45% of American's not only don't believe in evolution (that would be about 80%, I think), but believe in Young Earth Creationism. […]
[…] effect where you now have Pat Robertson, a mainstay of religious fundamentalism, backing down on Young Earth Creationism, citing real science and admonishing his followers not to dismiss it for fear of losing their […]