top | item 46029166

(no title)

Egret | 3 months ago

[flagged]

discuss

order

defrost|3 months ago

> The Christian creationist movement has plenty of people from the hard sciences with PhD's precisely because it is defensible, logical and evidence based.

Is flawed logic in itself.

I had a wonderful teacher in Civil Engineering with a PhD in Engineering and immense skill in the computation of harmonic wind induced vibrations in truss frames and other such things.

They also had a strong personal belief in young earth and other creationalist notions for which they had no professional background or grasp of radioactive dating whatsoever.

People with STEM PhD's are not immune to error or projecting expertise beyond their experience and qualifications.

Egret|3 months ago

That is true, going outside of areas of expertise is fraught with risk. The best creationist material on radioactive dating was published by the RATE group. We include a summary of this material in an appendix of the book.

andsoitis|3 months ago

How old is the earth?

Egret|3 months ago

If you use a philosophical uniformitarian interpretation of the amount of process that has occurred on earth or in the cosmos, you will get a figure of hundreds of millions of years or even billions of years. We do not dispute the amount of process. We deny philosophical uniformitarianism, which is an atheistic presupposition. The age of the earth, according to a reasonable interpretation of the Old Testament, is likely to be 6000 (Masoretic text) to 8500 years (if you rely on the Septuagint versions).

Egret|3 months ago

I regard the Masoretic text as generally more authoritative, so I would give an age of the earth/cosmos in calendar years of approximately 6000 years.