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Old 02-17-2007, 04:18 PM   #22 (permalink)
SecretMethod70
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But no one here is asking why you believe in God. The question is why you believe that something written by man (which you admit) in the bible is necessarily true, despite evidence to the contrary. Plenty of people believe in God, but do not believe in the historical or scientific descriptions of the bible.

I noted in the other thread, before this one, that carbon-dating is not used for objects older than 45,000 years. For older objects, there are other forms of radiometric dating to be used. So, I understand why you question carbon-dating - there have been well-publicized errors in the past (and barely publicized adjustments for those inaccuracies) - but I'm not sure why you are so certain that something has been "proven wrong." If it had been even remotely proven wrong, it would not be used and accepted today by, well, every scientist that isn't trying to promote a particular religious view on creation. That, by the way, is barely an exaggeration. Something that has been proven wrong should have at least a significant amount of detractors, if not a majority. Radiometric dating doesn't even come close to that.

Simply put, my belief in what science has told us regarding the age of the universe, earth, and dinosaur fossils has nothing to do with choice at all. No more than my belief that matter is made of atoms is a choice. Sure, I could choose to belief that atoms are fictional, but people wouldn't exactly look upon that view with much respect, and with good reason.

Your comment regarding the big bang only further perplexes me though. How can the evidence for the big bang be correct, but the age determined by the same evidence be incorrect? Not to mention, of course, that the age determined by the evidence of the big bang comes from very different methods than radiometric dating. Are all the different methods of radiometric dating and all the evidence observed from stellar radiation incorrect? That's a whole lot of mistakes in a whole lot of accepted scientific methods, all followed by a WHOLE lot of scientists. What I'm trying to convey here is that by believing that the Earth is not billions of years old and that dinosaur fossils are not many millions of years old, and that evolution has not taken place in the way science describes it, you are literally saying religious leaders are smarter than scientists and despite the fact there are hundreds of thousands of scientists who affirm the validity of these methods, they are all less intelligent than the religious leaders who reject their findings. Personally, I wouldn't tell the entire medical profession that I'm more intelligent than them simply because I believe it to be so, and I'm not comfortable with the idea that people do that to the scientific profession.

I want to reiterate, because I think this is an unnecessary point of contention if I'm reading your post properly, believing what science tells us does not negate belief in God. This conversation has absolutely nothing to do with why you believe in God and everything to do with why you believe in a specific story in a specific book written by, as you admit, human beings. Unlike belief in God (which one can neither prove nor disprove), this discussion is about something which one can prove or disprove, so please forgive me for not understanding an inability to explain. Even fundamentalist Christians at least recognize that it is a topic which requires at least some answer to science, so they say they believe the bible is the inerrant word of God. It's a logically false argument (since the Bible is the only thing which verifies itself as the inerrant word of God), but it is at least something. Since you clearly do not believe that (or else you would follow Paul's teachings), you don't have the luxury of that argument. This is precisely why I'm so curious to hear some sort of explanation as to WHY you choose to reject the findings of hundreds of thousands of scientists (who, I'm sure you'll admit, are far more educated than you or I in their fields of study). Hearing on the news a decade or so ago that carbon-dating (which has nothing to do with dinosaur fossils, btw) had some accuracy issues is not a very credible argument. First, because if that remained to be true then science would have rejected it quite quickly, and second, because those issues were resolved.
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