Apparent Age

Isn't that what you Christians say? That we're all God's children?

No, we don't. We do become God's children if we become Christians however. You don't qualify.I'll assume that your silence refering to him helping you out in the bathroom means that yes, you do wish he would wipe your butt. Actually, it would be great if he would, as I really don't enjoy the process much myself.

Trying to find that article I read on it...as soon as I find it, assuming a do find it (I read about it a year or so ago) I'll share. As far as finding human fossils showing great age...what are you smoking? I said before the flood (which would almost certainly destroy them all) and if they were able to live longer, maybe, just maybe, they would age differently. I mean, it seems obvious to me that if a person is able to tack an extra half millenia or so to his life, that maybe it would mean that the body was acting differently than ours. However, if I do find a skeleton in a lump of coal, with a sign on it saying "Hi, I lived 800 yrs", you will be the first to know.[This message has been edited by Navy10E, 03-14-2004]

Been there, done that.I realize you think I was born an atheist, or that I made that choice because I hate authority or something, but that's far from the truth. I used to be a Christian.I'm an atheist because God doesn't exist. If he did, then he would have done what everybody said God does - answer the honest prayers of Christians.So, in fact, I was one of God's children. The reason I'm not now is because if God exists, he's abusive to his kids. And good thing I realized that - my life was heading down the tubes until atheism turned it all around. Not exactly. It'd be nice if He kept his promises, though.[This message has been edited by crashfrog, 03-14-2004]

Oh I get it. It's personal with you. Science really doesn't count. It's about how God "wronged" you. Ok. At least I know where you're coming from.Nobody is born an Athiest, gosh, just cause I disagree with you doesn't mean that I'm automaticly someone who assumes stupid crap. Nobody with an ounce of sense in thier heads would look around, see the world, and say "Golly gee wilikers, I'll bet there's no such thing as a God." A person has to work to convince themselves of that.

I've honestly been praying for a hot girlfriend for a year now...still no answer, I suppose I should become an Atheist, eh? But we are talking about salvation and Theological stuff now, and thats off topic. That moose dude'll be around and he'll beat our butts if we don't get back on topic soon.

I have no problem admitting that my atheism is a direct result of my experience as a Christian. What else would it be based on? Science itself tells us nothing about the supernatural, as the supernatural is by definition inaccessable to science.I'm an evolutionist because that's the explanation supported by the evidence. I'm an atheist because I don't believe that the Christian god exists. That's two separate things. Somehow I don't think you do, but only continued conversation will tell, right? Oh, I'm very sure that when you assume stupid crap, there's nothing automatic about it. Unless, of course, they're not raised in a culture that believes in your god. That is to say, the majority of them. The very existence of other religions - other, very different religions - proves you wrong. Actually, it's pretty easy. You just look around and say "hrm, is this the kind of world that a loving, all-powerful God would allow to exist?" The fact that a loving, all-powerful God doesn't exist stems pretty naturally from that thought.What is hard work, however, are the mental acrobatics you Christians have to go through in order to reconcile the God of the Bible with the world of humans. I don't know how you guys do it! Exhausting!

Couldn't hurt. And it might just cure you of that "holier-than-thou" arrogance that reasonable people find so offensive. Just a thought.

I seems that since about message 5, this discussion has had, at best, only tenuous contact with the theme of "Apparent Age".Let's all get back on topic.Adminnemooseus

"Oh, I'm very sure that when you assume stupid crap, there's nothing automatic about it."This is a great line. I don't care that you're opposing me, this was well crafted, and deserves honor and respect, however inacurate it may be. The point is, no, I hadn't assumed that you were always an Atheist."Unless, of course, they're not raised in a culture that believes in your god. That is to say, the majority of them. The very existence of other religions - other, very different religions - proves you wrong."This doesn't prove me wrong, however anxious you are to do just that. I do believe that the vast majority of those religions have dietys of some kind. "Higher Powers" maybe, or "Guides"...but they all have some kind of being, set of beings, or higher consiousness involved. You have none of that. You are a minority. New Age theory is really picking up numbers fast from the Atheist movement too.

No, the Flood does not explain the fossil record. It can't even explain the geology of the rocks, let alone the order in the fossil record.Nor is it reasonable to suppose that God created stars which can only be seen with the most powerful instruments we have just so we could look at them.And I don't think you appreciate the magnitude of compressing much of the Earth's vulcanism into a single year. In itself the Deccan Traps eruption was a major catastrophe - far bigger than anything in recorded history. The Siberian Traps are even bigger. Both sets of eruptions are disastrous enough to be considered possible causes of a mass extinction event.

To give a polite answer to your question, I don't smoke anything.So...there are lots of skeletons that look just like they are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, and look just like they came from people who were at most a few decades old when they died. There are no ancient skeletons that look like they came from people who lived to be half a millennium old. Can't you offer anything better than 'maybe, just maybe' or 'I'll let you know if there ever is any evidence'? That does not sound like a repeatable observation to me.And there's only one article on 14 foot people? Aren't palaeontologists studying them?

I'm sure that an omnipotent being could do that, but let's put them into the apparent age discussion that's supposed to be here.There are supernovae observed every week that are, by any of a dozen or so astronomical yardsticks, millions or billions of light-years distant from us. The simplest of these yardsticks include that these supernovae, intrinsically very bright, look pretty faint from Earth, and that the galaxies that they occur in look both faint and small in angular size. Fancier yardsticks include a measurement based only on simple geometry to a galaxy called Messier 106 - it's 25 million +/- 1 million light years away, and the the tag end of a supernova explosion has been observed in it.
So - let's take as an example a supernova in a galaxy 50,000,000 light years away from us. The star that exploded to give us this show had to have done so 50,000,000 years ago. You can't fudge the speed of light here, because we can observe the precise shape of the "light curve" - the change of brightness with time - of this supernova, and it matches up exactly with the light curves of more distant or nearer SNs, or with the curve calculated by laboratory measurements of how fast nickel-56 decays to iron-56. (That's the power source for most of the light from one class of supernova, and we've seen its specific spectral signature in the SN radiation.) Had the speed of light changed, the rate of decay of 56Ni would have changed, too.Okay: the Genesis myth has all the stars created on some "fourth day" a few thousand years ago. Observation, occasionally even naked-eye, of stars shows occasional explosions that happened much longer ago than that. So stars are blowing up before they were created.Sure, a God could do that. Sure, a God might have some mysterious reason to do that. But if he did, he's deceiving us. I think it's a little more reasonable, if you feel the need to include YHWH as the god in your worldview, to assume that he told the ancient Hebrews a tale that they could understand, not one that was literal in every detail.

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There are two main models of how the Universe came into exsistance. The one most of you dandies out there believe is the big bang/evolutionary model

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I do hope you aren't lumping the ToE, which is a theory of Biology, with the Big Bang, which is a theory of Cosmology.They are quite unrelated.

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and the other is the Creationism model.

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Um, which Creationism model?Creationists have never reached any consensus because there are dozens and dozens of various interpretations of various sects of Christianity.

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Now you have to understand. Niether of them is science!! Science is repeatable.

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Incorrect.Science is not repeatable.Observations of the evidence must be repeatable, not the event itself.

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When you repeat the big bang, then I'll give it some consideration as science. Till then, it isn't.

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By your definition, science is unable to conclude that Pompeii was destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius because we can't repeat the event.

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Same goes for creation, but we don't mind admiting it.

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Fine, then, you admit that Creationism isn't scientific.

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If there is a God (and I strongly believe that there is), what makes you think that you would understand his thought?

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Well, fine, but this is about as unscientific a hypothesis as one can have: "God made the universe look a certain age, but it really isn't, and we know this because we don't understand why God would appear to deceive us."