by bluebell 7 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
just wondering and not wanting to take over perrys thread re: dinosaur DNA
i know the dubs poo poo the idea of carbon dating saying that it's all wrong and that the human and animal remains are not millions of years old because according to them mankind is 6,000 years oldish, is there anywhere where they contradict themselves on this, so that they accept carbon dating on some things and not on others?
Hi bluebell,
No, it appears from the information on the WT Library 2005 that they do not accept carbon dating, not even with a chapperone.
Dave
What about the carbon dating on the dead sea scrolls? Don't they accept the age of older copies of the bible to "prove" certain prophecies were written before hand?
Turin Shroud.
Theres Creation by God....but of course animals and people would have had to evolve due to living contions, i.e. weather, etc. We all know the JW do things to their advantage and then repell the same ideas.
I seem to recall JWs accepting some comparitively recent carbon dates such as artifacts from the ruins of Jericho or something similar. When dates are applied to anything older than their date for the Flood, they become increasingly skeptical, because in their minds, the presence of the water canopy would dramatically alter all radiation levels before that time (a premise not supported by any science, sort of like saying fossils of fish from the ocean depths should appear much older than fossils of animals living in the mountains) Also, note that carbon dating is only ONE method of radiometric dating, and only accurate for once-living things less than 100,000 years or so. This is because the half-life of carbon 14 is comparitively short, about 5730 years, so by the time a sample has experienced radioactive decay for 10 or so half-lives, the amount remaining is so small, it is difficult to detect. So, no dinosaur sample could be CARBON dated, because after 60,000,000 or so years, there would be so little carbon 14 remaining. However, there are OTHER radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, polonium, radium, even an isotope of lead, which occur naturally in rocks, and which have much longer half-lives. These elements CAN be used to accurately date rocks older than 4 billion years, even after such a long time, the remaining amount of isotope is still sufficiently large to be detectable and accurately measured.
The Society does not dispute the age of the earth based on uranium-lead dating:
*** g81 11/22 p. 13 How Old Are the Fossils? ***URANIUM-LEAD DATING. Uranium is a radioactive element that very slowly changes into lead. The common form of uranium, U-238, disintegrates at such a rate that in 4,500 million years half of it changes into lead. The age of a mineral containing uranium can be determined by measuring how much lead has formed in it ... with proper attention to such possible pitfalls, acceptably reliable dates have been put on many old rock formations. Based on this method, the age of the oldest parts of the earth’s crust has been set at over four billion years.
They even use it as an argument against young-earth creationism:
*** g83 3/8 pp. 14-15 Creationism—Is It Scientific? ***How can creationists reconcile such evidence with their dogma that everything started just a few thousand years ago? When God created the rocks with uranium in them, did he also put in the right amount of the special isotopes of lead that would make them look a billion years old? When he made the Andromeda galaxy, did he also fill the path to the earth with light waves, all along its 10 thousand million billion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles, so we would not have to wait to see it in the sky? Would the God of truth purposely insert such illusions in his creation just to deceive us?
Yet they have no qualm being 100% skeptical of dates for fossils that fill the gap between 4.5 billion and 6,000 years ago, which are also based radiometric measurement. Did God put the right amount of radioactive isotopes in sediment to make all dinosaur and pre-Holocene fossils look millions of years old? What's good for the goose...
I think they are trying to discredit any and all tools that are used to prove that the earth is older than about 50,000 years old. Radioactive elements decay at a constant rate, and hence are reasonably accurate.
What they say about carbon dating being way off is a crock of bulls***. As any ninth-grade science student knows, carbon-14 (which is used in carbon dating) decays at a constant rate. And the products are predictable. So, by measuring the concentrations of products, it is accurate to within reasonable limits. What the Witlesses say (with zero proof to back it up) is that one cannot tell within several orders of magnitude how old something is by measuring the concentration of decay elements. That's a blatant lie.
Also, if the earth was only 50,000 years old as the Witlesses claim, then why is it not all molten? A mass the size of the earth takes billions of years to cool through, and we have a crust that is several billion years old. The 20 miles or so of crust insulates the interior of the planet, slowing the cooling down some more. If the earth was only 50,000 years old as the Witlesses claim, the crust would still be extremely unstable and thin. For sure, it wouldn't be thick enough to insulate us from the core's extremely hot temperatures, and life would be nearly impossible. It would also be subject to upheavals. Not to mention that in 50,000 years, there would still be a fair amount of matter still raining down that would be capable of smashing into the crust with enough force to destroy the whole crust. In fact, this has happened while the earth was forming. One such hit was enough to create our moon!
And there is the problem with light traveling at 186,282.397 miles per second. At this speed, it would take more than 10 billion years to cross the universe. There is no reason to expect all the light waves/particles (it's still in the air as to which) to be filled in; nor would light travel those distances instantaneously. Light from distant quasars takes more than a billion years to reach the earth, and some of the farthest ligth now being picked up by the Hubble telescope was en route for more than 10 billion years. Is this only 50,000 years old? Is light's speed so unreliable that top scientists cannot tell how old the universe is?
No wonder the Watchtower Societh wants children to be so tired on Fridays. They will not pass these science tests, which are showing up during high school and even junior high. The Tower wants people to flunk astronomy and physics. Then, they can pull scams like this without people asking questions. I only wish I could educate Nigerians at the administrative level so I could make sure every Nigerian child knows these basic facts by the seventh grade. I wonder what the Tower would do if they see 475,000 Bible studies discontinued and another 280,000 S-77 forms all coming out of Nigeria because of this.
