ericmurphy
Posts: 2460
Joined: Oct. 2005
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Well, this won't be the first time I've pointed this out, but evidently it bears repeating: AFDave simply is not competent even to engage in discussions on these topics (I think most people here will agree that if someone believes the earth is less than 10,000 years old, he or she is simply not competent to discuss any scientific topic).
But Dave seems to believe that, by dint of a few trips to the AiG website and a few quick Google searches, he can get up to speed. Well (in the immortal words of Malcolm Reynolds), he can't.
I'm not a trained scientist (not by a long shot), but I have read extensively in the sciences on my own over the past 30 years or so, and have at least a layman's understanding of most disciplines (chemistry is probably my biggest weakness). In all that reading, I've come to an understanding of and an appreciation for how scientific evidence from widely disparate scientific disciplines is mutually confirmatory and reinforcing.
For example, let's look at the earth's age. Dave's Bible tells him the earth is 6,000 years old. But there's no evidence from any other area of knowledge that confirms or reinforces that belief. On the other hand, the true age of the earth (4.6 billion years, plus or minus a hundred million or so) is confirmed from almost every branch of science: astronomy, cosmology, geology, chemistry, physics, biology, paleontology. It's not just that there's a mountain of evidence for the earth's age. More important, in fact, is that all that evidence, coming from multiple independent directions (and there's no inherent reason why any of it should converge on any particular value), points to the same value, within a few percent.
I told Dave a while ago that if he wants to disprove, e.g., the earth's > 10^9-year age, he can't just find flaws in a few pieces of evidence here and there. He'd have to comprehensively refute as much as 90% of it, because the remaining 10% is probably enough to clinch the argument. Given Dave's overall scientific ignorance, he doesn't have a prayer of doing that. Which should be obvious, given that the overwhelming scientific consensus (the opinions of people who actually are competent to evaluate the evidence) is that the earth is close to six orders of magnitude older than the Bible says it is.
This is the part Dave doesn't get. That, and the fact that you can't just become an instant expert in some area of science by reading a few articles on the web.
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2006 MVD award for most dogged defense of scientific sanity
"Atheism is a religion the same way NOT collecting stamps is a hobby." —Scott Adams
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