Measuring the Age of the Earth (2014)
whatisnuclear.com
whatisnuclear.com
How do we know the starting ratio?
The professor didn't really answer my question, just a sort of "scientists have measured it" type answer... which didn't make sense to me because scientists didn't exist 4.5 billion years ago or whatever, so how could they measure the starting conditions.
I think the poor guy was so accustomed to hostile questions on the topic that he interpreted it that way. I imagine many of his students came from a young-earth creationist background and didn't always take that section of the course well. Or maybe I was just reading into it and the guy was having an off day. (as an evangelical christian, old-earth vs new-earth was often a topic of discussion)
But it was actually an honest question. And this article finally gave me the answer I was looking for. Plotting an isochron of different radioactive elements solves for both the age and the original composition of the sample.
Many of my friends were young-earth creationists. It's not a topic I hear much about anymore, but I've had many lively discussions about it.
YEC is interesting because there are different ways people think about it in relation to science. The most straightforward would be to claim something like "God created the universe with the appearance of age", so that it would be actually < 10k years old, but appear billions of years old.
Such a theory is consistent with scientific findings, albeit falling prey to Ockham's Razor, and violating the principle of Uniformitarianism, both of which are probably pretty crucial to the Philosophy of science.
Theologically this approach isn't quite as jarring as it may at first appear. I once heard it put as a question: "Did Adam have a belly button?" If he did, then that's not really all that different from "the appearance of age" in general.
For me personally it still didn't sit right with me, and I also disagreed with the general interpretive approach taken to scripture. Genesis isn't a scientific textbook and I don't think it should be read that way. I highly recommend this book for an alternative interpretation: https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0...
In general I think science is very important and undervalued in the christian community in general and that's unfortunate. To give just one Biblical example, King David spent years tending a flock of sheep by night, with nothing better to do than stare at the stars for hours on end. As scientifically illiterate as he was, he still knew a lot more about the constellations than I ever will.
Atmospheric lead came from tetraethyl lead in gasoline. He spent decades campaigning against it, and came close to having his academic career destroyed by stooges paid the Ethyl Corporation[2]. Through sheer persistence and strength of character, he managed to get lead additives banned a few years before his death.