Food for thought:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/061110.html

So, do you believe in "God created people roughly 7000 years ago"?

No, I believe people invented god roughly 7000 years ago.

All cultures have creation stories. People need an explanation for where things come from. Since they didn't have the science, they made up a mystical/religious story to explain things.

Yes, but I find disconcerting that potentially 1 in 2 people I meet still believes in that.

Anyone that believes that "God created people 7000 years ago" should be hit on the head with a tack hammer. We have archaeological proof (in the form of Austrolopithicus Africanus, the oldest (or was that Austrolopithicus Afarensis?) account of a humanoid fossil, dated back about 2 million years ago or so, according to standard carbon dating. Give or take an eon or so.. you'd still be well ahead of a measly 7000 years.

Might not have been homo sapiens, but the similarities are profound enough for science to claim her as the oldest record of human life on Earth.


Gandalf

Ah.. but I remember from quite a few years ago (pre-2000 in fact) that the carbon dating method could be disputed as giving false results. That the method dates things to older than they actually were.

Of course I don't have that bit of image material (it was a docu) on hand, but I will look about in a bit on Google, see what I can find.

(I am in the middle of cooking dinner here, hence )



I wasn't entirely correct in my memory. It was that carbon dating cannot be used to date things 2 million years ago. Beyond a certain time period all it is is theory and guesswork.

More info

It could be disproven, or shown to give false results, but then we'd have to go through a whole lot of work dealing with the fact that carbon dating has been the method for which we have defined the timeline of Earth's evolution.

Take the dinosaurs, for instance. We've managed to break down their reign of the Earth into all of the various periods based upon "evidence" shown as to when each species walked the Earth, by the carbon dating of fossils showing when each species lived. Then, we track the changes and how each new era generated an adaptation to deal with the changing environment. As old species went extinct, the next generations developed resistances to the things that killed off the dinosaurs.

Of course, no level of genetic adaptation will really work against a huge meteor smacking the Earth and raising up a dust cloud that caused an Ice Age.

Still, the carbon dating method has allowed us to be able to chronograph and chart their existence. It may be off a bit, but I honestly don't think that they would claim something such as:

"According to carbon dating, this species of dinosaur walked the Earth 65,000,000 years ago... give or take 64,000,000 years."

Either way... to state that God created the Earth 7000 years ago doesn't give a great deal of time to show the "evolution" of the species. The Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons.. all the way back to Austrolopithicus... that's a lot of ground to cover, and I don't think 7000 years would cut it.


Gandalf

It's not only carbon dating, there are other methods and all point to the same timeline, so basically if you use different clocks that measure time using different means to measure the time and all show the same thing -- you have to believe them rather than a dusty book that was written by people who most likely didn't know to count past 100.

So, who do you believe: scientists who use all the means of the 21 century or some anonymous guys who wrote a book 2000 years ago and proclaimed it "holy".

Well, it seems to be modern people that want to believe the "God created mankind 7000 years ago", rather than the ones who wrote the books 2000 or so years ago.

Personally, I think they're retarded, and I have absolutely no understanding of what it is they are trying to prove by making that claim. I'd have to go with "proven" science on this one.


Gandalf

Oh, well.... it depends how you interpret the Bible, to me it's more like cherry-picking, people pick what they like and interpret as "allegoric" passages that they don't, these particular nuts cherry-picked something that fails basic -*test*-('")s of reasonable thinking.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"

No…

It is the rough date that I put human beings settling down and becoming ‘cultured.’ Well for the most part, I know there where groups still doing the nomadic thing even to this day. I mark that day as the birth of civilization, of a new evolution of human, but there was a lot of years passed since the birth of the, several, physical forms of human.

But then I still think the universe is timeless and that it is human mono-linier thinking, that everything has a beginning and an end in a ‘one way path’ through time, that leaves us believing there was a start date for the multiverse, a group of universes, and an end one somewhere out there.

You know, this just brought a line from "End of Days" to mind...


Regarding God: "If something good happens, it's His will. If something bad happens, 'He moves in mysterious ways.'"


Gandalf

More food to add to thought

Evolution happens. But it can also stop and turn on a dime. A new study of lizards in the Bahamas shows that the natural selection pressures that drive evolution can flip-flop faster than previously thought -- even in months.

"Darwin was right about so many things," said Jonathan Losos, a former Washington University biologist who led the study. "In this case he was wrong. He thought that evolution must occur slowly and gradually."

Evolution can happen quickly, study finds

Does science really prove anything or do we believe everything science tells us because it's science?
The difference between science and religion isn't that science proves what it claims, it's that science will change its hypotheses and theory as new evidence is discovered and presented while religion will not.

Not that I believe humans are less than 10,000 years old because I surely don't.

This is the proof that science is wrong.

Adrian... what in the world was that?!

P-W.. if you'd note, I said "'proven' science", with proven encased within quotation marks. What is proven in science is only that which, after numerous -*test*-('")s and constant analysis, never changes. Other instances are hypothesis and theory, which are not proven but have a basis in truth, but have yet to be -*test*-('")ed or have shown variances which cannot as of yet be explained.

As for religion... I was raised Christian, but there is entirely too much that goes completely unexplained that it left me disillusioned.

So, God created Adam and Eve.. and then... that was it. Where did the rest of the world step in? Adam and Eve begat Cain and Abel.. and then what? There were no other females that were known at this point. Also, according to this whole Bible thing, God is supposed to be benevolent, kind, just, and generally good. So.. Adam and Eve messed up, and all of humanity is condemned for it. Or, if Adam and Eve were the only humans, and then he created a whole bunch of people to populate the world and they were already judged by the actions of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were created with Adam and Eve's sin already on them. I used to bring up the whole "dinosaur" concept in my arguments with people, asking where were they in the Bible?

"Oh, well... God created the world in 7 days.. but a day to God could be millions of years for us.. and that's where the dinosaurs came from."

Yeah. Wonderful explanation. Thanks for the insight.

Also, I cannot overlook mankind's vanity in having us be "made in God's image". Who are we to presume what form an entity of that amount of power would have? Presumably, he could have any form he damn well pleased... who's to stop him or say "No, you can't do that."

All in all, there is too much that doesn't make sense or doesn't add up for me to honestly believe all of that which I read in the Bible. Apparently, history can document the existence of Jesus, or so it is claimed, but this doesn't mean that everything written is Truth.


Gandalf


Side Note: As written in my introductory message, I do follow the tenets of the Kybalion.. because it at least attempt to fill in the gaps and explain things in a reasonable fashion. With the Bible, you get a whole lot of empty spaces where we know things have happened that have been completely left out of the story.

How am I supposed to believe that this is a document revealing the entire history of mankind, from our creation and onward... when there are big, gaping holes that are blatently obvious plaguing everything?