Yeah, this is broken because all lead did not have to come from polonium, that's how half-lives work.
It's still 100% bullshit in every way, someone just needs to have chatgpt4 sort out the current mass fraction to explain why, I'm way too lazy to argue against insanity.
I assume someone saying this is a creationist and can just say god created Earth already with the lead in it. Therefore it is a pointless discussion.
Which raises the question of why he would create a planet with the illusion of age and send you to hell for falling for his own trick.
lady of the pain tier deityship
I always found it funny how they'll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say "oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they've been in the sky for a long time" but very often they just don't have an answer because they didn't think of one. Unfortunately, there's almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to
The debate between Bill Nye and a creationist is so rage inducing. It's a terrible premise and the fact that Bill even agreed to it gave the creationist credit.
The correct answer would have been: "Why should I? You're an idiot."
When I was being raised as a young earth creationist, the earth was supposedly 12,000-20,000 years old. Then it was 10,000 years old. Then only 6,000. After I outgrew that nonsense, I joked that in a few decades YECs would say that their god created the earth in 1980, and anyone older than 40 are agents of the devil sent to test your faith.
Of course, the universe was actually created in 1970 and anyone claiming to be older than 54 is an agent of Microsoft sent to test your faith in Unix.
Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.
Last Thursday.
I was also raised as a young earth creationist and it was always 6k years old for me but I could not begin to tell you why.
I'm not even sure how you get to 4000 years old from biblical literalisim.
Edit: going strictly by the biblical account, Adam lived to 930 years, and Noah 950. IIRC, their lives did not overlap. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. A whole bunch of stuff happens in between Noah and Jesus. So even if you're working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
So even if you’re working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
You can't. The "Young Earth" people are morons.
The original calculation (adding up all the ages in the genealogies in the Bible) was done a few hundred years ago, but all the young earth creationists I saw put the start at 4000 A.D., so 6000 years ago.
4000 A.D
you mean BC?
Because anti-evolutionists decided a myth that the Earth is only 4000 years old is the quickest way to refute claims of evolution.
It's not an argument one forms by observing evidence.
There is a very old Jewish Holiday which celebrates new year on a calendar starting with the creation of the Universe, only about 5000+ years, but even that is obscure af.
The Bible has a long list of names with birthdays and who begat whom. It came from Irish archbishop and scholar James Ussher.
If you believe in the Bible, you get a 4000 year old Earth.
Ussher calculated 4004BC as the start of the universe, which would be about 6000 years ago.
That's my point. Most YEC point to 6000 years. Even within their own framework, I don't see how you get to 4000 years. My best guess is they saw 4004BC and forgot that 1 BC was about 2000 years ago.
I had a dude come up to me at the reference desk and tell me that the earth can’t be billions (he said trillions, lol) of years old because erosion from the Mississippi River would make it wider and deeper than it is. I pulled up some info including the idea that the Mississippi was something that came about more recently because of plate shifting, etc and he just said, "Nah."
Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can't argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it's now) which basically uses the same argument.
“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove
It's also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.
And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.
Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.
I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.
There’s bread from 14,000 years ago
Look I don't like them either, but you can't refer to crusty bishops that way
Young earth creationists make up new element called "creationite" from which all elements came from, thereby filling in the radioactive decay plot hole in their narrative.
eat lead? this guy probably has already done that one
Probably not willingly. Republican States are often horrible at updating infrastructure, and due to the lack of a well educated population, they don't suffer much repercussion for that. Very high chance they grew up with or still have lead pipes.
Not to argue for creationism, but this argument sucks. Lead can be produced by supernova, not just through decay of heavier elements. But even that's besides the point, since if you believe some entity created the universe, surely said entity could have created whatever ratio of lead to uranium they wanted. It's not a falsifiable claim, there's really no disproving it, unfortunately.
(Not so fun fact: the environmental impact of leaded gasoline was discovered by trying to estimate the age of the earth using the radio of lead to uranium in uranium deposits, but the pollution from leaded gasoline was throwing the measurements off.)
Also I'm amazed by how people don't seem to understand what half-life is. It's not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It's the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.
So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.
Also, we could be way off on the age because we just don't know. Sure, we can collect data and extrapolate for billions of years and assume that all elements have always decayed at the same rate, but short of living through it and accurately measuring it with modern instruments, molecules-to-man "macro" evolution can't actually be proven.
This is why, using the Scientific Method, it is still a theory. A theory accepted by most scientists, but still. There's a certain arrogance in declaring solved something we can't actually know for 100% certainty.
Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.
Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:
That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
The Bible is a couple thousand chapters long. The creation story is the first two chapters. It's pretty obviously only attempting to establish that God created the universe in some ambiguous way and move on with the story. That doesn't stop people from inferring all sorts of things from what is essentially a poem.
It's literally a poem in the original language.
Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
Most people don't know that the Hebrew word "yom" (day) can be and is used to denote wildly different lengths of time.
If anyone is interested you can read a fine destruction of the stupid "Young Earth" argument at the link I provided.
The "Young Earth" people, both Christian and Jew, are trying to shoe horn something into the Bible that doesn't fit and doesn't need to exist. It's nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto an old, wrong headed, and man-made theory.
Well there's also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.
I thought carbon dating of fossils was our best argument against the 4000 years myth.
God could have put the fossils there with the right carbon isotopes.
You can't use logic to disprove belief in magic.
There's a fun belief in physics regarding this "superdeterminism".
It essentially states that two entangled particles exhibit entanglement not because of any property between them but because they share the same cause origin point (the big bang) and that their respective spin states correlate more with the big bang than each other. Essentially the spin experiments will always appear to show entanglement, but it's actually a byproduct of the big bang.
Which, as we can all maybe agree, is fucking weak by order of being disprovable
This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
Real question: Is the decay of uranium the only natural way to produce lead? If so TIL.
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