Larry.org

Is darwinism the belief that Charles Darwin existed? Is Charles Darwin a religion?

Can I be a Darwinist? Or a Darwinista? Darwinian (without being specifically related to him)?

There's dinosaurs in the Bible?

Anyway today at a coffee shop in my grocery store (you guess which kind), I learned that Dinosaurs are in the Bible.

Apparantly this isn't a fact, it's a belief that some people have. There isn't any evidence so I suppose it's more accurate to say: Today in the grocery store I learned that some people believe that dinosaurs are in the Bible.

There's a number of interesting web pages about this. Google "likes" the Institute for Biblical & Scientific Studies Are Dinosaurs Mentioned in the Bible? page alot, and I can see why, it's a fairly comprehensive collection of interesting unproven bits of evidence that would support any reasonable person's conclusion that dinosaurs could be in the Bible.

Thing is, whatever unexplained creatures may have existed in the past, or the present for that matter, them aint the ones scientists mean when they use the word Dinosaurs. Interestingly, some of these Dinosaurs in the Bible pages posit that because the word Dinosaurs was invented in the 1800's that means that the word Dinosaurs could mean anything, even these creatures we don't have a word for in English that are in the bible. I'll let you try to work out that circular logic on your own. Don't spend too much time on it.. as it doesn't make any sense at all.

Ism is a suffix that implies lots of things but I'll assume this person meant religion, or belief, right

So this very nice person, who I enjoyed talking with, and who I have to assume enjoyed talking with me, said that she didn't believe in Darwinism. That "believe in" is what leads me to conclude she meant -ism- to mean...

doctrine or philosophy (e.g. pacifism, olympism)

from the Answers.com website.

So when I asked her if she meant that Charles Darwin didn't exist, she probably shouuld have corrected me and said, "I don't believe in the doctrine or philosphy behind his scientific theory of revolution". But who the heck is that percise at a coffee shop.

Does Carbon-14 dating allow us to scientifically conlclude the world is 6,000 years old

So here's two interesting web pages that talk to Carbon-14.

How Stuff Works explains the mechanics behind Carbon-14, and the way age is calculated.

Mike's Origins Resource explains how the math used with Carbon-14 dating could result in wildly inaccurate ages for fossils.

It's a great conflaguration of thought to read each of these two pages. They clearly make good cases. I wouldn't call the Molecular History Research Center's page science. I'd consider it unfounded speculation. For that matter I wouldn't consider the How it Works page science either as much as an explanation of the mechanics that must be true if we agree with the scientific evidence that has been to date discovered and agreed upon as sound.

The main point of the Molecular History Reasearch Center's page is that we dont' really know that C-14 has been as constant in the Earth's biosphere over the last 6,000~10,000 years. It asks us to question this idea. I find it very interesting to contemplate that C-14 would have been absorbed at a different rate in a biospheres that existed before our ability to measure C-14 ratios was perfected.

I'll bet Darwin would've loved to have lived long enough to try to find data to answer that question. See that's where the science starts. Someone says, I believe this, someone else says I believe that, and then you go try to find data that objectively supports your theory and that people that don't even agree with you can't refute with other data.

The data we have since we discovered the ability to correlate artifacts of living objects with known dates and measure C-14 suggests that over an extended period of time the level of C-14 in the biosphere hasn't moved appreciably, much less trended down dramatically.

Do (fundamentalist?) Christians believe the theory of evolution is bad science?

I'll leave you with this thought.

Cause as a progressive Christian, I believe condemning science because it can't prove the Bible is evidence of a religion with a serious lack of faith. And while I have no problem with people believing the scienintific conclusions we are currently taught are wrong, I have a major problem when people want to have science accept another theory with zero supporting data.

Keep in mind:

• there's no doubt that a good size percentage of scientific conclusions that we've been taught, the scientific community now concludes are wrong


• Evidence and proof of erroneous scientific conclusions are actively encourageed by the scientifc method


• In fact science is benefitted by the identification and elmination of erroneous scientific conclusions. Scientist call this, Scientific Progress. It makes scientist famous when the get to re-explain a really big erroneous scientific conclusion.


• No scientific progress has been attributed to taking a specific piece of data on faith.

So it seems to me if you want to be a famous scientist you should set to proving that C-14 existed in different ratios during previous periods of time on earth and that these ratios steadily trended to these different levels. I wonder if anyone has tried to do that before?