evolution or creation

A few points of correction to an otherwise excellent post (which will, alas, educate nobody):

@Thalassokrator said in #90:
> you can only use radiocarbon dating for determining the age of organic remnants which are younger than 75,000 years

True. In fact the measurement of ages bigger than ~60.000 years is already quite error-prone and shouldn't be taken at face value. There are other decay processes, though, which can be used in a similar way. See also Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%E2%80%93Ar_dating
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon%E2%80%93argon_dating
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium%E2%80%93thorium_dating

etc.

> Indeed it is. And the Big Bang theory makes testable predictions and is based on observable evidence:

The evidence you quote is correct, but there is more to it: the Big Bang follows directly from the laws of quantum mechanics and this is the best (tested) theory physics has to offer. About one third of all the machinery surrounding us is directly based on quantum effects (including your computers CPU and the LASER in CD-ROM drive). The properties of an electron have been predicted and the prediction were correct up to the 12th digit behind the comma - talk about precision. It is hard to believe that we oculd build and predict all with this theory that but were fundamentally mistaken when we applied it to the origin of the universe.

> Decompose makes it sound like it splits up into its constituent parts. It does not (necessarily).

In some way it does and i wouldn't be too harsh with physical illiterati. We also say i.e. someone had a "heart attack" which the correct medical term is "yyocardial infarction". Basically the parts of a nucleus (protons, neutrons and a few gluons, because atomic nuclei are held together by residues of the strong force) indeed tear apart, leaving (one or more) smaller nuclei, some stray particles (depending on the decay: fast and slow neutrons, protons, neutrinos, photons, ...) and some energy (usually heat). If you sum that all up you get what you had before, more or less.

> And these gas clouds don't contain elements heavier than Lithium at all! Big stars however DO contain elements heavier than Lithium. That's because they fuse lighter elements into heavier ones in their cores by a process known as nuclear fusion.

Hold on: These gas clouds typically do contain heavier elements. But as they contract they start to rotate (like the skater rotates faster when drawing the arms in, conservation of momentum) and heavy and light elements are somewhat separated. Most stars, when they are finished forming, contain mostly hydrogen and some helium, therefore. If you look at the composition of the planets, though, you see the the densest (the "rockiest ones") are the innermost ones whereas the outer ones are equally balls of mostly hydrogen.

> After a while the star contains a small amount of heavy elements (meanwhile it has radiated away energy in the form of light). The heavy elements cannot have come from outside the star, it's surrounded only by the gas clouds (which don't contain heavy elements).

Not so fast: when the sun formed it basically was a ball of mostly hydrogen and a bit of helium, which contracted under its own gravitational force. Contracting things become hotter and denser and at one point hydrogen nuclei started to fuse: first to deuterium, then to helium. This process is still going on in the sun and makes it shine (yes, indeed, it also stops the further contraction). But after about 10 Billion years the hydrogen will be exhausted. The sun(s center) will contract further, now that nothing holds it back any more and as the core gets hotter another process starts: Helium nuclei are fused to lithium and carbon. Then again, when all the helium is exhausted, the sun contracts again and a new process starts fusing carbon to oxygen, etc.. All this ends with iron (element 26), because fusing iron to heavier elements doesn't release energy. At this point the sun contracts even further and the electrons are pressed into the nuclei making protons to neutrons. Basically a single big "nucleus" of about 10km radius is formed from most of the suns remaining mass. The rest is blasted off in a final big explosion. It is in this explosion, lasting a few seconds, where all elements heavier than iron are formed by proton bombardment of the gas surrounding the core (the sun has an "atmosphere" similar to earth, only it consists of very hot gas.

If someone finds it elevating to be created by a god: i find it elevating to be star dust!

All this is based not only on the precise knowledge of the processes involved. That also means that the distribution of elements have to be in certain relations and in fact these relations have been found by observing absorption spectrae. It has also been found - see above, there are only particles with even numbers of protons/neutrons involved - that elements with even numbers should be there in much bigger quantities than elements with odd numbers of particles inside the nucleus. What should i say, exactly this is the case in the observable universe. In fact the elements life is based upon: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen - are the most common elements in the universe. Maybe it is not such an outside chance that life started?

> This is a hyper literalist reading of the bible. Why shouldn't Genesis be read as a metaphor?

Because "god" doesn't work as a metaphor. "God" only works absolute. Consider the first commandment: you shall have no gods beside me. isn't that a bit strange, given a god with a monotheistic attitude? IF there are no other gods, as he says is the case, then this commandment makes about as much sense as: THOU SHALT HAVE NO THIRD EYE!! Or there are indeed other gods and we are to lie to him that he is the only one??

Set aside the xtian (or, rather: jewish) doorstoppers for a moment and look at all the "holy books": they all have in common that they promise there followers to be somehow "chosen", "redeemed" or otherwise better than the rest of mankind. Only this makes it possible to start with "i bring peace to earth" and proceed to "kill them if they don't elieve what you believe". Here is, for example Deuteronomy 20, 11-13 (New International Version):

> When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace.

[Ahh, a religion of peace.]

> If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to
> forced labor and shall work for you."

[So, by "peace" they mean in fact "slavery".]

> If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to
> that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the
> sword all the men in it."

I might be too rotten morally to appreciate a genocide, but to me that sounds rather disgusting. And if this god is a god of peace and love he needs some serious language education!

> People who take Genesis to be hyper literal in my opinion don't appreciate the magnificent poetry it contains!

Well, the part i just quoted sounds more like "Mein Kampf" than anything else.

> The Bible is and was not ever intended to be a science book and that's ok, isn't it?

According to the bible whale are fish ((Jonah 1:17 comp. to Matthew 12:39-41) and bats are birds (Leviticus 11:13-19), so if it is a science book it is definitely not one about biology.

> The point is that such a view is unfalsifiable. And that isn't a good thing, it
> is a bad thing. It means that it cannot make any testable predictions. It's
> therefore worthless for science.

I would like to have a discussion about empiriocritizism as you just hinted at. Still, as far as this discussion is concerned the probable differences in our views are neglectable. Suffice it to say that rubbish is not only worthless for science but for anything else too. Even in daily life i have to have a model of reality i can draw conclusions from. And from "god made the world appear older than it is" nobody can conclude anything - save for what i said above: believing is suspending critical thinking and vice versa.

> Furthermore the author is conflating the colloquial use of the term "theory"
> with the meaning of a scientific theory (scientists demand a lot more than
> just plausibility from a framework of interconnected hypotheses before they
> agree to call it a theory) here, but I'll let that one slide.

The classic! A theory has ... but see above, #85. "God exists and has created the world in 6 days" explain nothing (why not 10 days?, who created god?, ...) and predicts nothing (show me a provable, observable course of action god will take under certain circumstances, otherwise my point stands).

> Not much is assumed. Certainly not what the author thinks is
> assumed is actually assumed.

Actually the only thing assumed is that the laws of nature are the same everywhere.

@Nomen-Nonatur

First of all, thanks for the compliment!

I appreciate that you added other dating methods, which can span the gap between C14-dating and U-Pb-dating (U-Th-dating has an upper age limit of 500,000 years for example). I left those out in my post #90, because they are not super relevant when all we are concerned with is the age of the earth/solar system. But that of course isn't to say that they don't have their uses in palaeontology, palaeobotany, palaeoclimatology, geology etc. so thanks for expanding on my post!

> The evidence you quote is correct, but there is more to it: the Big Bang follows directly from the laws of quantum mechanics and this is the best (tested) theory physics has to offer.

I have to respectfully disagree on this one. The Big Bang theory describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state.

Of course parts of the theory make use of quantum mechanics. Baryogenesis for example is "[...] based on different descriptions of the interaction between fundamental particles. Two main theories are electroweak baryogenesis (standard model), which would occur during the electroweak epoch, and the GUT baryogenesis, which would occur during or shortly after the grand unification epoch. Quantum field theory and statistical physics are used to describe such possible mechanisms." (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis)

It's very similar with Big Bang nucleosynthesis, which also uses the standard model of particle physics (i.e. a quantum field theory) and has been able to successfully predict the relative abundances of elements in primordial gas clouds.

Furthermore, anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) are understood to have arisen from microscopic quantum fluctuations in the early universe, which are unavoidable due to the uncertainty relation of quantum mechanics. The CMBR looks the way it does (and structure formation went down the way it did, forming galaxy cluster filaments and large voids) because of anisotropies in the density of the early universe explained by the uncertainty principle.

But that doesn't mean that the Big Bang theory in itself directly follows from quantum mechanics (or quantum electrodynamics as you alluded to by mentioning the sublime prediction of the g minus 2 factor of an electron). It doesn't. That the universe was once in a hot, and ultra-dense state is not a prediction of any quantum field theory (you cannot derive this initial state from any QFT). It is a hypothesis which was originally formulated by Lemaître and others in order to explain the observational evidence by Edwin Hubble, who had observed galaxy recession rates depending on their current distance to us. Hubble found that the greater the distance to the galaxy, the greater its recession rate, indicating an expanding universe. It was this cosmological evidence that inspired Lemaître's hypothesis of an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state (by way of extrapolating this cosmic expansion backwards in time using the known laws of physics), which was ridiculed by Fred Hoyle as a "big bang".

Only after the CMBR was accidentally discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 most cosmologists began to accept that the Big Bang theory (the nickname had unfortunately stuck by then) could more parsimoniously explain the evidence than the steady-state model of the universe could.

While the hot, ultra-dense initial state cannot be derived from the equations of quantum mechanics, you can of course apply those equations (microscopically) to a given initial state of that nature. And that's what physicists ever since have done, because the observable universe WAS microscopic at that early time. As might be expected, this largely works out, because QM is indeed the best theory of the universe (on microscopic scales) there is. This lead to the correct prediction of the relative abundances of elements in the early universe etc.

> In some way it does and i wouldn't be too harsh with physical illiterati.

You're right, energy for example is conserved. I just wanted to point out that a (free) neutron can β-minus-decay into a proton by way of emission of an electron and an electron antineutrino. And it's not like a neutron is literally made of a proton, an electron and an antineutrino.

The neutron is made of a quark triplet (udd) of up- and down-quarks, while a proton is (udu). In a β-minus-decay one of the neutron's down-quarks interacts with the W-minus boson field (one of the force carriers of the weak nuclear interaction), thereby being converted into an up-quark with the W-minus boson decaying into an electron and its antineutrino (the boson field is interacting with the lepton fields). That's why it's not called decomposition. The standard model cannot be understood via classical principles.

But you are right, I shouldn't be that pedantic, maybe the original text was (google-) translated from a language other than English, which would explain it.

> Hold on: These gas clouds typically do contain heavier elements.

You are right, after many generations of stars producing heavier elements via stellar nucleosynthesis (nuclear fusion) a gas cloud which has already seen a lot of star formation indeed becomes enriched with heavier elements. That's what had happened with the gas cloud from whence our sun stems.

I should have been more clear in my post #90, but I was only talking about primordial gas clouds there (which have seen little to no star formation so far). For these gas clouds what I said is actually true, they don't contain elements heavier than lithium/beryllium (the heaviest elements formed by Big Bang nucleosynthesis). The stars I'm describing in that paragraph are the Population III stars in the very early universe: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population#Population_III_stars

Of course I gave a greatly simplified picture.

> But after about 10 Billion years the hydrogen will be exhausted. The sun(s center) will contract further, now that nothing holds it back any more and as the core gets hotter another process starts: Helium nuclei are fused to lithium and carbon. Then again, when all the helium is exhausted, the sun contracts again and a new process starts fusing carbon to oxygen, etc.. All this ends with iron (element 26), because fusing iron to heavier elements doesn't release energy. At this point the sun contracts even further and the electrons are pressed into the nuclei making protons to neutrons. Basically a single big "nucleus" of about 10km radius is formed from most of the suns remaining mass. The rest is blasted off in a final big explosion. It is in this explosion, lasting a few seconds, where all elements heavier than iron are formed by proton bombardment of the gas surrounding the core (the sun has an "atmosphere" similar to earth, only it consists of very hot gas.

Correct. By coincidence, I've recently written a post about this very subject in another thread: lichess.org/forum/off-topic-discussion/what-if-the-earth-was-bigger-than-the-sun?page=2#15

A minor nitpick: Our sun will become a white dwarf star, a few thousand km in radius, not a neutron star (which would be 10 km in radius). The sun is not massive enough to collapse into a neutron star.

> i find it elevating to be star dust!

Me too! It's so cool!

> In fact the elements life is based upon: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen - are the most common elements in the universe. Maybe it is not such an outside chance that life started?

Indeed. Only helium is missing (it's very common in the universe but uncommon in life). But that's easily explained by its chemical properties. Helium being a noble gas is nearly chemically inert, meaning that it doesn't like to form compounds and molecules (needed for complex life of our variety).

> Consider the first commandment: you shall have no gods beside me. isn't that a bit strange, given a god with a monotheistic attitude? IF there are no other gods, as he says is the case, then this commandment makes about as much sense as: THOU SHALT HAVE NO THIRD EYE!! Or there are indeed other gods and we are to lie to him that he is the only one??

It has been argued that the first commandment can be understood as a metaphor as well: That way it would mean, don't worship other things as if they were a god. Don't make other things (like money, power, etc.) rule your life, don't devote yourself to those things as if they were gods. The Bible for instance says: "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon.". Mammon need not necessarily mean another actual real deity, it might only mean the allegory of greed and moneymaking. Stating that worship of God is incompatible with money worship.

Whether or not one is convinced by this line of argument is debatable.

> Even in daily life i have to have a model of reality i can draw conclusions from. And from "god made the world appear older than it is" nobody can conclude anything

Indeed, this was the point I was trying to make with my treatment of the Omphalos argument. The proposition that the world was created looking older than it really is makes no testable predictions and is therefore irrelevant. We can never decide its truth value and that's it.

> Actually the only thing assumed is that the laws of nature are the same everywhere.

Yes, this is the underlying assumption that science is based upon. Although it's very natural to assume this, it can never be shown to be true, but so far it has yielded very useful results. That's why it's a useful assumption.

I have a question for all the "the-bible-is-the-literal-truth"-people here:

I have a neighbor, he is a bus driver working for the cities public transport system. I sometimes see him leaving the house on a friday afternoon in his uniform, obviously he is going to work.

Now, Exodus 35,2 states:
> Whoever does any work on it [Sabbath] is to be put to death.

And Numbers 15,35 clarifies:
> The whole assembly must stone him [the Sabbath-breaker] outside the camp.

Now, you see, i live in a big city and it is quite difficult to gather all its inhabitants for a stoning. So my question is: do you think it is permissible to gather just a few people and do the work of the lord? Have you any experience how to properly stone people (you sure have seen sabbath-breakers before and have put them to death, haven't you?). And if so, would you like to come here and show me how its done correctly?