C-14 MADE SIMPLE

by Amazing 12 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  AlanF

  To lookingnow22:

  Your point is well taken.

  The quote you cited shows another form of deception by the Society: knocking down straw men. They mention that in the late 1800s, "some might still have doubted whether Isaiah chapter 53 had been written centuries before Jesus' birth." Who "some" is, is not specified. However, I don't know of anyone back then who wrote about any claims that Isaiah might have been written after Jesus' birth. Thus, the Society's statement is a mere straw man designed to knock down an argument that no one had made. A valid point would have been to say that various Bible critics doubted whether Isaiah was written as far back as the 8th century B.C.E., and that they dated its writing to at least as late as the 6th century B.C.E. But then the Society's writer would have had no point at all, since the Dead Sea scrolls are all at least 400 years later than that.

  Having set up his straw man, the Society's writer proceeds mightily to knock it down: "However, discoveries since then have essentially removed any basis for doubt." Big deal -- there was never much doubt from any quarter that Isaiah had been written at least a couple of centuries before Jesus' birth.

  This deceptive bit of writing also illustrates another method by which the Society often deceives readers into thinking it has proved some point: deliberate use of fuzzy language to confuse issues. The average JW who reads the Creator book is already convinced that Isaiah was written "centuries before Jesus' birth". How many centuries? More than seven. But by remaining fuzzy, and relying on the reader not to notice that the 'evidence' the writer cites is off by about 600 years, the writer deceives naive readers into thinking that the evidence actually supports the Society's dating of Isaiah.

  This kind of deliberate deception by use of fuzzy, ambiguous language is well illustrated by how the Society has dealt in the last couple of decades with the question of how long the creative days of Genesis were. Until about 1985, they consistently taught that the days were 7,000 years long. In the 1985 Creation book they did not mention this number, but spoke of the days as being "millennia long". The last mention I can find of the 7,000 years is in a 1987 Watchtower, and all later references to the lengths of the days is to "millennia". Obviously, "millennia" can mean "7,000" or seven million or several billion. It appears to me that whoever is writing these books doesn't want to put in anything that can be overtly challenged, like a claim that life on earth began a mere 20,000 years ago, and yet doesn't want to upset the many JWs who have long believed, and still believe, that the 7,000 year per day notion is still taught. Thus the Society, by being deliberately ambiguous, deceives various readers into thinking that it supports their personal favorite notion of the length of the creative days.

  It is astounding that so many JWs are unable to see through this sort of transparent subterfuge. But it is a measure of the lack of critical thinking skills of the average Jehovah's Witness.

  AlanF
• 

  You Know

  "According to their wish this fact escapes their notice, that there was an earth standing compactly out of water and in the midst of water..." That pretty much explains the rational of your entire argument; that as a ridiculer of Christ's presence, it is your wish to blind yourself, and others, to the fact that Jehovah once destroyed an ancient world; even in your foolish presumption of imagining that you have some how disproven that such a thing occured. Because the Bible indicates in several places that the earth was originally shrouded with an atmospheric ocean, and as noted, such a condition would have greatly affected the amount of C-14 produced, you therefore are forced to declare that no such flood took place in order to prop up your cornball theories of human origins. / You Know
• 

  AlanF

  To Bobby Priest-King:

  Ah, I see you've returned for more punishment. When you signed off H2O a few months ago, I told you that you'd be back. Score one for Alan's predictive ability. Of course, your ability remains at -100.

  As for a global flood, there is zero evidence in favor of one, and gigantic amounts of evidence against one. We have thoroughly documented proof of what massive, local floods do, from the geology of areas such as the "Channeled Scablands" of eastern Washington. If a relatively tiny cataclysm like the "Missoula floods" 13-15,000 years ago, which involved only a volume of water equal to Lake Ontario, could create such massive local devastation, then a far bigger global flood would of necessity create far more devastation over virtually the entire surface of the earth. The fact that we do not find such devastation is absolute proof that no such worldwide cataclysm occurred.

  As for the fanciful "canopy theory", note that the Society stole that from the Young-Earth Creationists back around 1965, not long after the now-infamous YECs Henry Morris and John Whitcomb published their book The Genesis Flood in 1961, which went on to spark the modern YEC movement and the ICR (Institute for Creation Research) and its derivatives. Of course, Morris and Whitcomb got their ideas from the Seventh-Day Adventists via the writings of their most prolific and crackpot author, George McReady Price, who published many crackpot books from about 1900 to 1945. In jumping on the YEC bandwagon, the Society dumped its traditional teachings about the Flood, which were essentially those of the crackpot author Isaac Newton Vail, who started his own nutty movement with his 1874 publication (the year Christ returned ;-) ) of "The Earth's Annular System". This theory appeared prominently in Watchtower books such as the 1943 book The Truth Shall Make You Free and the 1927 book Creation.

  Any way you look at it, Bobby, the Society is teaching what amounts to SDA and YEC ideas on the Flood.

  Interestingly, the YECs did some studies on the "canopy theory" and concluded that physically, the earth's atmosphere could at most support a layer of water vapor amounting to the equivalent of a few inches. That's because of things like the greenhouse effect (the earth would heat up to intolerable levels with more than the equivalent of a few inches of water) and the fact that a vapor layer would be inherently unstable (i.e., because water vapor is lighter than air, it could not remain on top of the atmosphere but would quickly mix with it). So these days, the YECs are saying that the "vapor canopy", if any, contained so little water that it would have had negligible effect on Noah's Flood. For obvious reasons the Society is avoiding all mention of "evidence for the Flood" these days.

  Another problem is that the Bible itself doesn't say a thing about a "canopy". That notion is entirely a product of the imagination of YECs and JW "science" writers. True, Genesis speaks about an "expanse", but whatever this "expanse" was, it was between the waters above and the waters below. Psalm 145 teaches that the clouds in the Psalmist's day were above the expanse, which simply shows that Genesis was calling whatever water is in the clouds "the waters above the expanse".

  The Society teaches another bit of nonsense about this "expanse" -- that Genesis gives a picture of something expanded vertically, so that the "expanse" is actually the atmosphere. Yet many other scriptures disprove this notion. The "expanse", in many Bible passages, is clearly expanded horizontally not vertically, and so it simply refers to the horizontally spread out appearance of the blue sky as seen by someone standing on the ground, i.e., it's a metaphor for "the sky". Job gives a nice word picture of this, referring to the sky being "beaten out like a hard metal mirror". The very Hebrew word for "expanse", "raquia", essentially refers to metal that is beaten out thin so as to spread out over a wide area.

  Really, Bobby, you're so far behind in the sciences that it's astounding. You haven't even managed to keep up with the Society's teachings. You don't even know that, for all practical purposes, they no longer have anything to say, except to repeat some old, thoroughly disproven ideas that they stole from the SDA's and YECS. What a sad commentary on you and your Fearless Leaders.

  AlanF