Creation vs. Evolution

Originally posted by aardvarkhome
Posting but ignoring questions put to you. Classic

You have something you want answered ask it again, if you have not
noticed I'm talking to more than a few people here and if I miss
something of yours get over it and ask again.
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
The closer to now the better don't you think?

No I don't. That is in fact one of your major claims that I have been disputing all along.

Being able to examine something in the here and now is easier to get a handle on all of the variables verses something you must make assumptions about in hopes you are not missing something.
That may often be true, but it is not a hard and fast rule (as my example with the lake was supposed to demonstrate.) And if we go back a mere day in time then the rule can be shown to be only a generalization that does not always apply. For example if I asked you what route a pigeon flew yesterday, you could not tell me however hard you tried yet if I have a film from 1930 showing a pigeon flying I can be fairly certain that in 1930 that pigeon flew that route. So it is the information available that counts and not the age of that information.
As another example, you were quite ready to agree that fossils were conclusive evidence of dinosaurs yet we both agree that the fossils are very old, you didn't say "well the 'variables' for fossils are so great that I don't know whether dinosaurs existed or not"

Even in this discussion we have seem people claim verification due to human recorded history, and while suggesting that they believe the human records of a few thousand years suggest we are correct as we date items that match that. You have personally looked at hundreds of independent tests, which agreed absolutely (not somewhat)? Just so I’m clear on what you are claiming are these independent tests using completely different in nature methods in how they come up with dates, or are they basically all the same in how they work, but done at different
times on different items, how do you define ‘independent tests’? Not
trying to be tricking just trying to understand what your claims are.
Kelly
The tests are mostly totally independent techniques as in my lake example.
To give some examples:
-Tree ring counts.
-Ice core samples.
-Stalactite growth.
-fossilization.
-carbon dating.
-nuclear decay dating.
-astronomy.
-plate tectonics.
-rock formation(various)
-weathering

Now some factors may affect more than one of the above, but there is no single factor that could affect all of them, and even for the ones that may be affected by a given factor, they would not be affected in the same amount.
And, as mentioned earlier by other posters, many of the methods can be verified over shorter periods by even further methods such as recorded history.

The number of tests and the amount of information available (despite the long timescale) far exceeds the information I had about the lake I mentioned yet you were willing to accept the lakes depth as fact but refuse to do so for the age of the earth.

Originally posted by KellyJay
Statistics cannot be wrong, but they can be missleading, for the
reasons I have been giving you.
Kelly

Statistics can be misleading when people selectively quote them or when people pull them out of a study's context. That is different than a flaw in the methodology itself. As for your "reasons," you've just been tossing out vague ideas. This is because you don't know the first thing about statistical methods so you don't know how to critique them. To the degree that you have been explicit with your "reasons" we've explained why they are not relevant.

I suppose if you want to keep playing the "It's All Faith" game, then one of us could compromise our principles a bit by saying your beliefs about the age of the Earth* require many,many orders of magnitude greater faith than ours do.

* - yes, we know what you believe whether you will be up front about it here or not

Originally posted by twhitehead
No I don't. That is in fact one of your major claims that I have been disputing all along.

[b]Being able to examine something in the here and now is easier to get a handle on all of the variables verses something you must make assumptions about in hopes you are not missing something.
That may often be true, but it is not a hard and fast rule (as m e willing to accept the lakes depth as fact but refuse to do so for the age of the earth.[/b]

Yes your card trick to me made me think if are sure that we could be
mislead about the here and now, why are you so sure you can be
right about the distant past? It will always be that somethings are a
little easier to know than others, seeing the dinosaur fossils tells us
what their bone structure looked like while they were alive, it does not
tell us how old they are what color their eyes were and so on.

You count each of your examples as reliable methods of giving us
billions or millions years for readings? You know or believe that it is
not possible that we could be looking at rock fomation and come up
wrong conclusions, or strange seansonal changes caused tree rings to
give a false impression and so on?
Kelly

Originally posted by telerion
Statistics can be misleading when people selectively quote them or when people pull them out of a study's context. That is different than a flaw in the methodology itself. As for your "reasons," you've just been tossing out vague ideas. This is because you don't know the first thing about statistical methods so you don't know how to critique them. To th ...[text shortened]...
* - yes, we know what you believe whether you will be up front about it here or not

Fine by me I get it, you are right your claims about the age of the
universe is true you cannot be wrong. I get it what you say is a fact it
cannot be wrong, you have all the bases covered, there is no way
you are wrong! You have it all under control, you have left nothing to
chance, you have all the necessary data points to be flawless within a
degree of error you accept and know is true, so you feel comfortable
to call your conclusions facts due to you understanding it is all beyond
doubt. I don't have to discuss this with you any more you have all the
necessary answers, because you have a model you claim is an
accurate representation of the universe as is. If anyone questions
you, they just don't have the necessary knowledge to grasp the
subject, because if they did, they would be forced to agree with you.
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
Fine by me I get it, you are right your claims about the age of the
universe is true you cannot be wrong. I get it what you say is a fact it
cannot be wrong, you have all the bases covered, there is no way
you are wrong! You have it all under control, you have left nothing to
chance, you have all the necessary data points to be flawless within a
degree ...[text shortened]... dge to grasp the
subject, because if they did, they would be forced to agree with you.
Kelly

YOU REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND
You can't provide value arguments, so now, it's "oh, you are sure you are right, you know all fact".
When it's exactly the contrary. We don't know facts, we never said that. We argued we don't know to be the fact nor be a accurate or flawless. Your ignorance on this subject is evident (even more then the age of the universe) and yet you continue to use arguments we refuted already. But you didn't understand why they were refuted and keep insisting on the same line of argument.
The worst blind is that who doesn't want to see.

Originally posted by KellyJay
It will always be that somethings are a
little easier to know than others, seeing the dinosaur fossils tells us
what their bone structure looked like while they were alive, it does not
tell us how old they are what color their eyes were and so on.

But according to you, the older something is, the less sure we should be, yet you seem quite sure about those dinosaurs bone structure. What happened to your "information decays over time" rule? Are you accepting that there are some things that we can be sure about even if they are very old? Do you agree that our knowledge of dinosaur bone structure based on fossils is totally independent of the age of the fossil ie if the fossil is 1 year old or 1 billions year old it will not in any way affect how sure we are about the bone structure of the dinosaur? Doesn't that contradict your earlier claims that the older something is, the less sure we can be?

You count each of your examples as reliable methods of giving us
billions or millions years for readings?
No, the reliability of the methods is not important.

You know or believe that it is not possible that we could be looking at rock fomation and come up wrong conclusions, or strange seansonal changes caused tree rings to give a false impression and so on?
Kelly
No, I quite clearly stated in my post that there could be reasons why any given method is wrong. However, no one reason would affect all the methods and no one reason would affect any two methods to the same degree. So the chances statistically of them all being wrong to the same degree is so improbable as to be considered impossible. Its as improbable as the dinosaur fossil being nothing more than chance deposits of rock that just happens to look like a bone.

Originally posted by serigado
YOU REALLY DON'T UNDERSTAND
You can't provide value arguments, so now, it's "oh, you are sure you are right, you know all fact".
When it's exactly the contrary. We don't know facts, we never said that. We argued we don't know to be the fact nor be a accurate or flawless. Your ignorance on this subject is evident (even more then the age of the universe) a isting on the same line of argument.
The worst blind is that who doesn't want to see.

It is as simple as this; you want to tell me the odds your right about
something. Say there are some cards in a box you tell me 1 out of
52 is the odds on pulling a particular card out of the box, your numbers
could be right, if there were 52 cards in the box if there were 3000
than no, if there were 2 than no. As long as you play with your
numbers and have the right values you can do the math, but unless
you know what is really in the box you don't know what the odds if any
of pulling a particular card out randomly.
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
It is as simple as this; you want to tell me the odds your right about
something. Say there are some cards in a box you tell me 1 out of
52 is the odds on pulling a particular card out of the box, your numbers
could be right, if there were 52 cards in the box if there were 3000
than no, if there were 2 than no. As long as you play with your
numbers and ...[text shortened]... the box you don't know what the odds if any
of pulling a particular card out randomly.
Kelly

You clearly have no understanding of probability whatsoever. You would be wise to do some reading on the subject.

Originally posted by twhitehead
You clearly have no understanding of probability whatsoever. You would be wise to do some reading on the subject.

I've been making a single point, you guys have been hiding behind
the notion you have all you require to know within a certain range
of error, to the point you call your views about the past factual.
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
I've been making a single point, you guys have been hiding behind
the notion you have all you require to know within a certain range
of error, to the point you call your views about the past factual.
Kelly

Clear misunderstanding of error.

if, with 99% confidence, you estimate your height as 5 foot 10 plus or minus 2 inches you have defined your height as a fact and demonstrated the accuracy with which you know that fact. You can know, as a fact that you are not seven foot nine inches, based on the same data.

If someone claims that a date is 206832.9783287916 years ago they are probably claiming spurious accuracy and may be misleading you. If they state the date as 206000 years ago plus or minus 2000 they are giving you useful information which clearly indicates the fact of the date and how strongly the data supports that fact.

if someone tells you a date is 206000 years ago plus or minus 2000 they are describing something old
if someone tells you a date is 206000 years ago plus or minus 200000 then they are saying they don't know how old it it.

if someone tells you a date is 206000 years ago plus or minus 2000 they are confident that it is not 7000 years ago

Hope this helps

Originally posted by KellyJay
I've been making a single point, you guys have been hiding behind
the notion you have all you require to know within a certain range
of error, to the point you call your views about the past factual.
Kelly

And you have made it abundantly clear that you agree with that notion so long as the age of the earth is not the item under discussion. You are ready to do that for:
1. Car keys in your hand.
2. The depth of a lake.
3. The skeletal structure of a dinosaur.
But not the age of the earth.

Yet whenever I try to get to the heart of your reasoning, you start up with "if I cant touch it, then its just faith" or "if I wasn't there its just faith".

So, are you saying that we do not have all we require require to know within a certain range of error, to the point you call your views about the past factual? If so, then what would be required? And don't say 'infinite knowledge' because you do not have that for the examples above which you were quite ready to call factual even to the extent that you threatened to leave the discussion when I questioned the reality of your car keys.

Originally posted by KellyJay
It is as simple as this; you want to tell me the odds your right about
something. Say there are some cards in a box you tell me 1 out of
52 is the odds on pulling a particular card out of the box, your numbers
could be right, if there were 52 cards in the box if there were 3000
than no, if there were 2 than no. As long as you play with your
numbers and ...[text shortened]... the box you don't know what the odds if any
of pulling a particular card out randomly.
Kelly

That's combinatorics, not statistics. You just proved my point: you can't debate about statistics.

We have maybe 1 million cards. We take 10000, of which 1/15 are kings, and we say: well... there's a 1/15 chance the next card is a king, although it should be 1/13.
You are saying we have no information whatsoever of the probability of the next card, because we can't know for sure and we don't have all the data. But I say we do, unless someone stole all the kings from the deck and had been tricking us with the previous experiments.

Originally posted by aardvarkhome
Clear misunderstanding of error.

if, with 99% confidence, you estimate your height as 5 foot 10 plus or minus 2 inches you have defined your height as a fact and demonstrated the accuracy with which you know that fact. You can know, as a fact that you are not seven foot nine inches, based on the same data.

If someone claims that a date is 206832. ears ago plus or minus 2000 they are confident that it is not 7000 years ago

Hope this helps

If for example the error started at 7 thousand years the futher you
went away from that date the worse your error. No matter what your
confidence was when you made your predictions you'd be off from the
time reality and you parted ways.
Kelly

Originally posted by KellyJay
If for example the error started at 7 thousand years the futher you
went away from that date the worse your error. No matter what your
confidence was when you made your predictions you'd be off from the
time reality and you parted ways.
Kelly

You are using error in two different ways here, and it's very confusing. You first use it to mean an event which effects all physical things (and thus their test results). The second time, you use the word to mean a measure of an estimate's distance from the truth. Neither usage is consistent with the way we are using the word. Our usage, which is founded in statistics, relates the amount of uncertainty about an estimate. In this way, every estimate, theoretically even one that is exactly correct, is measured with error. The smaller the error is relative to the estimate the more certain the tester is of his/her estimate.

If you could just elaborate a bit more on this new hypothesis it would help. One thing that matters is if you are suggesting that things existed before 7,000 years ago and then were physically altered by an event (in such a way as to distort results from every known age testing method in almost exactly the same way) or if you are suggesting that the world began 7,000 years ago and there's some logarithmic decay in all the dating methods* that is not detected. In either case, we should be able to statistically identify the event with enough samples, the method is just different. Of course, one can always hypothesize the "undetectable event" which by definition cannot be statistically, or otherwise, identified.

* - I have absolutely no idea how something like that would be possible. It would almost certainly be something outrageous like subatomic invisible gnomes that steal the isotopes to simulate decay (as well as inserting varves and tree rings etc), in order to pull of some great conspiracy for world domination.