Posted on 03/24/2005 12:04:54 PM PST by wallcrawlr
Nope.
More like prooof that the scientific community is off by more than 69 million years in their scheme of reality while the creationists are only a million years off.
Decay .... maybe not but dessicate and petrify ... definitely. Face it. Dinosaurs lived much closer to us in time than the scientific community purports.
The fact that you can't accept that soft tissues can survive (in very limited cases) for 70 million years doesn't actually lend any support to the fairy tale that the Earth is only 6000 or whatever years old.
As has been mentioned, this is a very, very rare occurence.
How does removing water cause petrification? In an enclosed space where water vapor couldn't escape, why would evaporation continue past the point where the partial pressure of water vapor in the enclosed space was equal to the vapor pressure of water at the ambient temperature?
In case you haven't studied basic geology and chemistry lately, the answer is that petrification is not simply the result of drying, but rather results from accumulation of mineral deposits which replace the original material. If the original material is isolated from the environment, there's no way for mineral deposits to replace the original material.
As far as drying out, I don't know for sure that the material that was found wasn't found in a dried out state. Even if it wasn't found dried out, in an enclosed space that's impermeable to water vapor, an equillibrium between the liquid and vapor phases of water will be established. In any gas mixture, the partial pressure of a component gas is defined as the fraction of the mixture that is composed of that gas multiplied by the total pressure of the gas. Therefore, if any water evaporated from the material and was trapped in the enclosure there would be some nonzero partial pressure of water vapor in that enclosure. Evaporation would continue until this partial pressure was equal to a pressure that is dependent only on the temperature within the enclosure. This pressure is called the vapor pressure of water (or any liquid, more generally). When the partial pressure of water in the enclosure becomes equal to the vapor pressure of water in that enclosure, evaporation stops. Therefore, it is not unreasonable for the sample to not have dessicated.
I can't prove it, but it is.
Way too many of those disagreements in interpretation are not necessary and not valid. Have you ever been a person who reads the bible everyday and has read through it 50+ times? Then found yourself in a debate with someone that is just sure they know what the bible says and has never even read it once. I don't consider this a valid difference in interpretational opinion. Then there is that whole Catholic thing where they happily supplement the bible and call it valid. Here we have 1 billion people in a ~Christian~ denomination who are all over the map in their beliefs and are convinced that the bible can't be trusted on it's own. Once again, not valid. To the outsider it just looks like everyone is reading the same amount and can't come to any agreement. That's simply not the case.
that you believe and are comfortable with that is all that matters. I have no desire to change your beliefs.
"We put a man on the moon, therefore our dating methods must be accurate" is a non sequitur. And 500% errors for items 4500+ years old don't seem outrageous if there was a world-wide flood accompanied by extensive volcanic activity around that time.
What exactly in modern physics is dependant upon a billion+-year-old universe?
The distance to most known pulsars. The abundance of most elements in the Universe. The proportions of radioisotopes in the earth rocks and in metorites.
One friend of mine (years ago) did a lot of examination of fossile trees. He pointed out to me that the wood still existed; only the interior protoplasm was mineralized. One could make slides for microscopic use.
"Somebody should eat it on Fear Factor"
Thats funny... I amost lost my lunch when I saw them eat the raw Ostrach egg.
"fossile" should be "fossil"
Facile fossil?
3-week old bologna deteriorates faster than this so-called "tissue sample" of T-Rex.
Of course they can.
It all depends on your frame of reference. If you were trying to tell a primitive tribe on a island how an airplane can fly, would you get into the specifics of thrust to weight ratios and the importance of wing shape to lift? The fact that it flew through the air and carried people would stretch their imaginations. Without basic physics any further explanation would be meaningless. Understanding this, you tell them:
A. The plane flew through the air (accurate without the specifics of "how")
B. The plane carried people inside in (accurate without telling them how the plane was flown)
They dutifully scratch out the story on a rock so it can be passed down. They primitives to whom the story is told to accept it at face value and are just so amazed at the enormity of the event that they wouldn't think to ask for an explanation.
Future generations of islanders, however, begin to wonder "how" this happened and they begin to construct, within their frame of reference, a "how" story around the "fact" story. Since the only animal that they know that can fly is a bird, they guess that a giant bird carried the airplane, which in their story becomes a canoe because that is the only thing in their frame of reference that can carry people.
I think the Bible is like the facts scratched on the rock, accurate as far as they go because of the limited frame of reference of those to whom they were told. It doesn't make them less truthful and it doesn't mean the teller was being deceitful.
I don't think the Bible is deceitful, but I do believe that much of the oldest historical narrative cannot be confirmed by physical evidence. The global flood is fairly specific and left no evidence. The six days of creation is specific and the evidence is of a much longer period. It is somewhat futile to look for confirming evidence of miracles.
Please explain (a link will do fine)
As it stands, I will probably agree with the details (the distance to the pulsars, etc.) and disagree with the conclusions (therefore the universe must be millons of years old.)
Many details of astrophysics theory are so unsettled (evolving, if you will) that using them as conclusive evidence in a debate is pointless, since you will probably end up diagreeing with yourself within the next ten years.
Light travels one light year in one year.
If a pulsar is a billion light years away, the light took a billion years to get here. The universe is therefore at least a billion years old.
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