Quote Originally Posted by WhiteWidow View Post
How come you can't believe in both? And the idea the earth is only 7000 years old is pretty fuckin retarded seeing as how we have dinosaur bones and carbon dating and what not
I'm not jumping into this beyond this post, as I don't think forum posts are conducive to a debate this size. To post as much info as it would take to make even a basic argument either way would be unwieldy. Just as a baseline, I am a Christian, but don't necessarily believe in a young Earth. The theology behind that is not set in stone...just too many variables in the scripture to definitively say so, because it's not explicitly stated. I believe the origin of that idea (<7,000 years) was from some clergyman's margin notes several hundred years ago who was attempting to simply add up lifespans of people mentioned in the Bible. It seems to me that the young Earth beliefs are often a lot of conjecture. It just doesn't appear to be clearly stated in the Bible to me. But, just as a sidenote, there are stronger arguments to be made for an old Earth than the mere existence of dinosaur bones and carbon dating. The age of the bones is deduced, for the most part, from the context in which they are found. The problem being, there must be a fundamental assumption of some baseline age in the surrounding stria. Carbon dating is essentially worthless in ages of this scope (even in the extraodinarily rare occurrence of any original material in a dinosaur fossil...usually there's no original material remaining; it's been mineralized/replaced). Its half life is much too short. In old Earth thinking, the last dinosaurs died off about 68 million years ago. Carbon's halflife is about 5,700 years...its usefulness in age estimation is significantly degraded by 25,000 years, and entirely useless beyond 50-60,000. That being said, there are other elements that could theoretically be used (K-Ar, etc.). Then, there's the whole thing with original matrix content, intervening contamination, etc.