by inkling 21 Replies latest watchtower bible
Simple rebuttal to AIG's attempts to discredit age of bush: http://www.answersincreation.org/argument/E611_creation_science.htm
More proof of really old plants: http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/The_oldest_living_thing_is_younger_than_4900_years
[inkling]
definitely talk to him in person.
1. if you're really friends it's way classier
2. sending this letter may as well be a DA letter if it gets in the wrong hands, and i think that's the trouble you're asking about, correct?
imo, never in writing and if you're really friends, friends say things to each other's faces, no matter how hard it is.
good luck.
I'm sorry of this admission is disturbing, but please
understand that it was also quite disturbing to admit
this to myself.I value our friendship, but I hope you understand that if
our friendship has a future, it will have to be one built
on a common ground deeper and more solid than that of shared
religious belief.
I would express these sentiments in person to him and see what happens.,
To send a letter seems impersonal . I prefer face to face if possible
Hope all goes well
Regards
David
excellent letter inkling
You may be able to reduce the risks by putting your reasonings in the form of questions you are are dealing with.
Also remember to send proof with your letter or links so he can check them for himself.
I like the letter - I may borrow some points to send to my son! (but in asking his advice mode)
ql
I wouldn't send it. You have some incorrect facts in there. And besides, Jehovah's Witnesses believe in a 40,000 year old earth. They believe the dinosaurs were here before the flood...stuff like that. So, you won't have any luck with them with those facts.
The facts you have wrong are the ones where there are tribes that are supposedly 10,000 years old. No scientists has found any evidence pointing to anything like that. We cannot prove anything is more than a few thousand years old, because none of our dating methods work. Not one. They all have uniformitarianism built into their foundations, which has been shown to be completely incorrect time and time again. For instance, carbon dating requires that the carbon levels in the atmosphere have been the same for the whole of existence, yet, as we know with the global warming research, carbon levels fluxuate all the time. They go way up or way down depending on the temperature. I wouldn't give him false information.
The dating of trees is also incorrect. If you go talk to any tree farmer that takes ring samples, he'll tell you that on a good year, a tree can produce as much as 7 rings. On a bad year, a tree may barely produce one ring. It all depends on how much sun and rain it gets, and how good the soil is and the weather. Those are growth rings, not annual rings. Ice core dating is also incorrect and cannot be used for dating. Some planes in Greenland were ditched in 1942, and about 40 years later they were dug out. They had 250 feet of ice on top of them. That's up to 4,400 some odd years worth of ice if ice core dating is correct. Granted, they had been pushed under another layer, and even though that would not make the date half as old, let's cut that date in half: 2,200 years. So obviously, these planes are not 2,200 years old. The way you get ice layers is from the sun coming out and melting a layer. This happens all the time throughout the year. So, those rings are hot and cold rings, not annual rings. I can show you ice core samples on Wikipedia from the same region that the planes were found in, and those rings are about 11 years worth for 19cm. That's the calculation I used to get the 2,200 years. So obviously, that's incorrect. Ice core dating is useless.
I'd at least use real data with them, but you can't find anything dated accurately past 40,000 years, and they wouldn't believe it anyway.
By the way, God didn't create cancer. He created a perfect world, and when sin came into it, it got cursed and things changed. We're told in the Bible that the ground would produce thorns and thistles now. Then, after the flood, we're told that things changed even further, like the animals would fear mankind now and things like that. Lifespans drop from nearly 1,000 years to only 100 years in less than 400 years after the flood.
Oh, forgot one thing: those tree core samples that claim over 6,000 years old... those are two tree trunks that grew together. Threes can graft into each other. They graft branches from one tree into another tree all the time. If two trunks grow together, you get almost twice as many rings when you take a cross-section ring sample. This throws off everything. And besides, we already disproved annual tree rings as being growth rings.
Cephyr, every single one of your counterpoints exposing "false information" has been debunked as creationist junk-science.
I will paypal you $50 if you can find peer-reviewed material from reputable academic journals to support any of your arguments about ice cores, radiocarbon dating, dendrochronology, the supposed lack of disease in animals before 4000 BC, and evidence of a global flood.
I'm absolutely serious, because these are the topics that made me lose faith in the bible so if what you're saying is true then it would have a major impact on my life, no?
However I've been to University, I've done actual research in scholarly peer-reviewed publications (unlike your brand of scouring the internet for unsupported misinformation), I've had drawn-out conversations with experts in their field who have pointed me towards even MORE information and after carefully considering all of it I arrived at my conclusion.
You, on the other hand, seem to be desperate for someone to "tickle your ears" with quackery as long as it supports the bible and you ignore evidence to the contrary.
If you would like some easily-digested refutations to your arguments and don't have access to a University library, try the talkorigins archive. They provide ample references so you can verify any claims made in the original academic source material.
http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs.html
I bet they have a billion stock arguments about the science. The witlesses have totally trashed the accuracy of Carbon-14 dating, even though it is known that Carbon-14 decays at a constant rate. They heve trashed other evidence that the earth is far older than 50,000 years old. They claim that the dinosaurs were destroyed in the Flood or before man was created (what purpose would Jehovah have had for creating a species solely to make people think it was much older?).
No wonder they do not want people to take college science courses. As disjointed as they are, they are far superior to anything that is found in the Asleep! magazines.
And besides, Jehovah's Witnesses believe in a 40,000 year old earth
this is false.....
*** w70 11/1 p. 645 It Is Not in the Bible! ***It should be noted that these seven great creative "days" do not include the creation of the universe, but only the preparation of earth for man. The Bible does not say when the sun, stars, planets, even the earth, were created. Genesis 1:1 states: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But it does not say when that "beginning" was, or how much time passed between the creation of the universe and the beginning of the first of the seven "days," mentioned in the next verse.
*** g02 6/8 pp. 10-11 Reconciling Science and Religion ***For example, when we understand that the Bible uses the term "day" to represent various periods of time, we see that the account of the six creative days in Genesis need not conflict with the scientific conclusion that the age of the earth is about four and a half billion years. According to the Bible, the earth existed for an unstated period before the creative days began. (See the box "The Creative Days—24 Hours Each?") Even if science corrects itself and suggests a different age for our planet, the statements made in the Bible still hold true. Instead of contradicting the Bible, science in this and many other cases actually provides us with voluminous supplemental information about the physical world, both present and past.
inkling:
Absolutely great letter! But, if you're 'afraid to send it', don't. That's your answer...trust your feelings. I think you 'know' in your gut, it will do no good. Because it is appealing to someone else's mind, and 'minds' are about more than 'minds', they are a reflection of our guts...I know that sounds very convoluted but it is how I have come to see things. If you feed him very small tidbits, you may get somewhere...just something I've been learning lately.
But the letter is a keeper.
Wow, Cephyr13, I'm not sure where to start...
Lets try a chronological list of you completely missing my point:
And besides, Jehovah's Witnesses believe in a 40,000 year old earth.
How is this relevant? First off, (as still_in74 pointed out) Witnesses will allow the earth to
be BILLIONS of years old. Second, this has exactly nothing to no with my letter.
They believe the dinosaurs were here before the flood...stuff like that.
Uh, yeah. I know. I actually AM a currently fading JW, so I know exactly what "we" believe.
Once again, this has nothing to do with my argument. My argument is that the Witness
belief is that before the flood all animals ate only plants. Dinosaurs (you know, the
ones living BEFORE THE FLOOD) Ate each other. Alot. This is a clear contradiction.
The facts you have wrong are the ones where there are tribes that are supposedly 10,000 years old.
Are you sure you even READ my letter? Because you seem responding to entirely different arguments.
I didn't say a scrap about "tribes", or when they lived. I said there are PLANTS that have been
living undisturbed for over 10,000 years. All credible scientists agree with this statement.
By the way, God didn't create cancer. He created a perfect world, and when sin came into it, it got cursed and things changed.
if you follow this link (http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/ancient/AncientRepublish_975839.htm)
and read the words on the page, you will learn about a scientist.
Working on a fossil. Of a dinosaur. With brain cancer.
sheesh.
Unless you plan on making a claim about some sort of dinoriginal sin, you argument is dead. Mourn the loss and move on.
The dating of trees is also incorrect.
Please note my previously posted link explaining how the multiple tree ring theory CANNOT actually be used to discredit
tree ring chronology:
Different locations on the mountain also affect tree growth in that factors such as temperature, moisture, soil thickness, soil type, susceptibility to fire, susceptibility to wind, and the amount of sunlight received vary, sometimes dramatically. For example, a tree growing near a stream would be less susceptible to the effects of drought. Even the genetic inheritance of a tree plays a role in that it will magnify or retard the above factors. Thus, even trees on the same mountain, of the same species, don't always cross date as nicely as one might think.
Creationists sometimes seize upon such isolated facts in their desperate bid to discredit tree-ring dating.They either don't understand--or don't want to understand--that careful statistical studies have settled the issue beyond a reasonable doubt.
Creationists will even quote statistics for species of trees which no dendrochronologist would ever think of using! Some species of trees are not sensitive enough to the year-to-year climatic changes while others sport such an irregular growth rate as to be worthless for precise tree-ring dating. We get horror stories from creationists about how easy it is for a tree to produce two or more rings in one year. They have neglected to inform their readers that such problems are minimal for some species of trees. Dr. Andrew E. Douglass, who pioneered the field of dendrochronology, found that ponderosa pine and douglass fir are especially excellent for dating purposes. In such species spotting a double ring was "...easy to do by eye after a very little training..." (American Scientist, May-June 1982).
In the case of the bristlecone pine, the problem of double rings is hardly any problem at all!
The dendrochronological check on radiocarbon dating is not without its own problems, the main one being that some species of trees may, under certain climatic conditions such as late frost, produce more than one ring per year [Glock and Agerter, 1963]. Fortunately, however, this has been "extremely rare" in the carefully checked history of bristlecone pines [Ferguson, 1968, p.840].
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Ice core dating is useless.
Once again, we don't seem to be both participating in the same conversation.
Ice cores have nothing to do with plants being killed during the flood. I am
sure I COULD defend ice cores, but seeing as it's irrelevant and you likely
wouldn't listen anyway, I'm not going to waste our collective time.
Oh, forgot one thing: those tree core samples that claim over 6,000 years old... those are two tree trunks that grew together.
Hey look... Another claim I never made! I never said there are core samples showing more that 6000 years.
What I said was by cross referencing currently living 4000 year old trees with currently dead trees that
lived their life span through a previous, but overlapping, time span. The "early" part of the live tree
and the "late" part of the dead tree overlap and match like bar codes.
And besides, we already disproved annual tree rings as being growth rings.
No, "we" didn't. Please read over the link I previously referenced for details of your wrongness.
Otherwise, just keep telling yourself that and we can pretend this conversation never happened.
[inkling]
