William Cowper and the Age of the Earth [pdf] (2019) | Hacker News Reader

William Cowper and the Age of the Earth [pdf] (2019)

charlespetzold.com

28 pointshwayne22 comments

My uncle believed in bible chronology. He believed it so much that he learned to program computers (to calculate and explore patterns in dates) and then built a series of web sites culminating in https://www.biblechronology.com/

When he died he had assembled a team of people who worked on it. The site is now suffering from a bit of rot (the videos don't serve anymore) but he has been dead for six years so I suppose that's no surprise. I don't know if his "gang" still maintain it, but someone must be paying for the domain and hosting I suppose.

The time and energy he committed to this are astonishing to me, he was a talented man - he had the option to be a partner at Arthur Anderson (progenitor of Accenture) before becoming a CFO at a series of small banks and building societies. His career was firmly on the up, he worked for one of the precursors of what became RBS in the 1980's. If things had gone differently perhaps he would have muzzled "Fred the Shred" and we'd all be the richer, especially his kids. But, at some point a conviction and faith gripped him and he gave up everything for his bible project. He died penniless.

I wonder, because I don't understand, because I just see numerology and over interpretation, does it mean he was wrong? I think so, but perhaps that's just my faith talking.

Speaking as someone who has been where your uncle is (edit:was), I don't hear it discussed much how tempting religion is to scientific/nerdy types, or anyone with a thirst for knowledge.

If you believe your religion's scriptures are an infallible set of truths handed down from above, then you've got the secrets of the universe in your hand and all you have to do to expand your knowledge is deduce correctly from that. It's an addictive hobby, and much easier and less messy than real science, where there's no final authority and you have to work for years to make a small discovery in one area and even then you might fail. Isaac Newton himself got caught up in that sort of thing.

Now, I'm just having fun - I disagree with the premise of this article if it states the universe is young or some bs like that, that said I am leaning more to the universe being a created thing than I'm not, like I'm 90% sure this was made - 10% with serious doubts.

I have conducted my share of comparative theology - I've read everything that's come out of the ground but that isn't where I arrived at this conclusion. Science keeps presenting me with proof of the universes construction.

Most recently I encountered this patent form the 1990s - since has been vastly expanded upon but this actual patent is fairly damning to any "random universal generation" concepts bc what it utilizes kinda can't exist and yet it does.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6017302A/en

How can a species evolve so that it's behavior can be exactly controlled and dicted by a noise at a frequency it cannot hear and is undetectable outside it's effects?

That is that patent - we are that species, a noise I cannot hear or detect in any way can me have to shit. Or fight. Or fuck.

How did I evolve that capacity? How did you?

The reverse is also true. If you're a nerdy type, physics' power of prediction can lead you to think the whole of reality could be explained in principle by physics. But there's of course no good reason for making this leap. Physics explicitly limits its scope to the material, so cannot be used as an argument that the material is everything.

I love that you just dismissed Isaac Newton's greatest curiosity as "an addictive hobby" - that may in fact be the best understatement of the quest for the "philosopher's stone" that I have yet encountered.

Perhaps there is a reason some of the smartest of us, for millenia, have fallen into this particular rabbit hole.

I also want to establish that Isaac Newton's quest was not inherently a religous one - the was very opposed to alchemists.

Do you really believe it was spirituality that motivated Isaac Newton? He already believed in God - the subject of his final research was something more tangible, which makes sense considering he was a scientist ;)

As someone who went to Seminary in my misspent youth I can't agree more.

Theology is a huge nerd snipe. Isaac Newton is my go to example for how it's a fixation with a extremely vicious cycle. There are whole manifestations of OCD that are just focused on religion as the core OCD fixation.

If forced to choose between owning a dishwasher, washer, dryer, AC, etc.... I would give up every moment of theology training, argument, etc. and keep the tech.

A big part of the difficulty with theological training is most people are graduating from schools that push hermeneutics that encourage tortured logic of the text. Ultimately training people primarily not to identify truth claims or evaluate propositions but to tie intellectual knots and take primrose paths that fall apart with any holistic scrutiny. Just read the papers coming out and you can easily see that people are graduating with PHD's in mental gymnastics.

All the good I've brought into the world, all the lasting things I've done and they have not had anything to do with theology.

My parents were academics who got nerd sniped by theology as well, the few times they stepped outside of theology they did so much good but all that time spent in theology just left them penniless and, ultimately, dying terribly early.

Myself, on the other hand, I spent seven years earning my MDiv in the early days of my career as an engineer, and have found it quite worthwhile. Perhaps the difference is that I still consider the most important thing about my existence to be that I am in Christ.

You might be less prone to being nerd sniped as well. Being employed as an engineer while completing an MDiv certainly speaks to a certain healthy degree of mental balance. Certainly higher educations that focuses on reading comprehension/understanding will have a broad positive effect, as will being a respected and educated (high status for some value of status) individual in a close knit community.

I think how devout a person is matters a lot, my parents always gave away their 2nd cloak away and I've known very few christians stateside who live with a believable degree of piety.

My parents would literally give up a dishwasher, dryer, car, computer, etc.. without second thought when it served the mission and they intentionally put themselves in places where that would be the case. Finding ways to isolate yourself from seeing others needs is a very common way of following the letter but not spirit of NT teaching.

I think north american christians typically have the best life outcomes when they practice restricted piety instead of taking NT injunctions seriously or literally, which is just a hedge of course against the existential doubt that seems to drive a persons observable behavior.

Agree or disagree with them but my parents also had a hundred fold (more than that actually, when I really think about it) return in reaching people, I don't know many NA christians who have had even 30 fold return, which definitely makes me question what type of seed NA christians tend to be. I've heard some very devout missionaries say that there they suspect there are very few christians left in NA and based on numbers alone many churches seem to be reaping negative numbers and the rest are growing through absorbing other groups.

I am humbled by their selflessness. Intellectually it can be so challenging to be a Bible-believing Christian in modern day Western culture, but I pray you will make your way back into the fold.

Most of us want our life to have meaning, and religion delivers it like a high powered drug -- it truly is the opiate of the masses.

I find this interesting because in my opinion once you study history, sociology and psychiatry everything about the Bible can be explained as man made.

> The action of a comet rather than straightforward miracle was an attempt by the materialists and deists to reduce God’s direct influence over the world and attribute everything to the secondary causes of natural law.

There is a lot to unpack there.

There seems to be an understanding that if second causes are involved, then no miracle (or, at least, a lesser one) is occurring. But is not the existence and continued functioning of second causes miraculous? Or, why do the laws of physics remain constant (apparently)? There can be no physical reason for that without creating an infinite regress.

The deist position that God is uninvolved in the clockwork universe he created is incompatible with omniscience. If its entire unfolding is contained within his thought, then his continued involvement is contained within the initial creative act. (Beware, also, of discussing time too literally in a context external to the universe.)

Here is a relevant teaching from the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), a document which is still in use, with some ammendments, by many denomnations today:

> 5.2. Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He ordereth them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently.

> 5.3. God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure.

The deist/materialist position is that God, if He acts at all, must be just another cause working in the universe, in the same manner as gravity, heat, charge, or whatever. Once this assumption is established (though rarely voiced), the "god of the gaps" attack is made. The idea is that God's action is a bad hypothesis, while [insert-theory-here] is a better one.

But of course, this is question-begging. It assumes what it is trying to prove, namely that the totality of reality can be explained by scientific hypotheses of one kind or another.

>But is not the existence and continued functioning of second causes miraculous?

I mean, I wouldn't call it miraculous, since a miracle implies some sort of interference with the usual course of things. And calling it miraculous would also imply that second causes have no kind of explanatory power whatsoever, which is clearly false. This also gets us dangerously close to occasionalism, which is the idea that God causes everything independently of their visible causes, a kind of equal-and-opposite error to deism/materialism.

As much as I like poetry, why do we attribute to a poet that which we owe to a most observant and introspective canal digger who felt free to question dogma and received wisdom?

William Smith deserves so much of our respect. Cf, e.g., https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Map_that_Changed_the_Wor..., which summarizes the most excellent book.

We don’t. The article explains and credits the scientific research that the poet is referring to. And to answer your question a second way: because that research came decades earlier than Smith’s work.

Slightly OT, but Cowper street in Palo Alto is named after William Cowper. So a fun shibboleth (and as OP points out) is that the name is pronounced KOO-per.

I grew up a couple streets over, and spent a lot of time on Cowper because a good friend lived there.

Always called it Cow-per (like the livestock). So it's interesting to know I've been wrong all along!

Interesting, I grew up near where Cowper spent his last years, and I assumed it was pronounced pretty much phonetically (assuming you have a norfolk accent).

However that looks likely to be wrong, given that he didn't grow up there.

Why did people assume that strata were deposited over eons and represent different ages? Many of these layers can be viewed in the Grand Canyon, and there is a notable lack of erosion between them. As I see it, these paraconformities are a strong evidence that there were not large gaps of time between the strata - they must have been laid down rapidly over a relatively short period (e.g. by a great flood).

It was assumed (correctly) by not long after Cowper's time that the strata were of different ages because of the different fossil assemblages in them, but of course no one had any data-derived numbers to put on the different eras.

Furthermore, there is abundant evidence for erosion between many of the layers in the Grand Canyon, and they don't look anything like flood deposits, which are generally chaotic (unsorted, discontinuous bedding, etc) because of the high energy in the environment during deposition. Paraconformities indicate a cessation of deposition, which is often accompanied by erosion. They are 'para' conformities not because of the gap in time between the layers, but because there wasn't major deformation of the Earth's crust during that time (this means substantial tectonic activity), which would cause regional tilting of the lower (older) rocks. Throughout much of the middle of the country, there are young sediments deposited in a paraconformable relationship on top of rocks that are 400 million years old (making up the surficial bedrock of the region), because there hasn't been major tectonic activity in the region since those 400 million year old rocks were deposited (and indeed, for close to a billion years before that in much of the midcontinent).

TalkOrigins.org has many detailed rebuttals to creationist lies. This one hybridizes two topics, or maybe it’s a garbled version of CD210.

Grand Canyon: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CH/CH581.html https://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/icr-science.html https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD210.html

Erosion: https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD610.html https://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CD/CD620.html

You could start with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratigraphy and go from there.

For the upper bound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Measur...

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