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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

> The report complains that when asked about the age of the universe, AIs just give the scientific consensus answer of 13bn years, never mentioning that young earth creationists believe it’s 600 [SIC] years old.

Where do you stop once you go down this rabbit hole? Which faith(s) get their views injected in? Christian? Muslim? Hindu? Pagan Gods? Should I get the perspective of the follower's of Thor when I ask a question?

Note that you can always ask for the religious perspective you're interested in. IME with the religion(s) I grew up in or know a great deal about, the LLMs are pretty good at answering accurately and respectfully. Nearly all the products already offer you tools to personalize the output for you too if you want to inject your faith into the answers, so it's not like the LLMs won't give you a religious perspective if you want it.

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> young earth creationists believe it’s 600 years old

Ahem, 6000 years, approximately.

> around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.

While the Gregorian calendar was in use for about 70 years by the time of his "calculation" of the age of the Earth, the Gregorian calendar was a Catholic invention and Ussher was very Protestant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ussher

Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes. Instead, the only primordial radioactives are those with very long half-lives. If there were a different rate of radioactive decay (as some YECs try to suggest), the Earth would still be a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface. And definately no liquid water anywhere.

Yes, the article had a typo in it (I quoted the article verbatim other than the [SIC] that I added). The correct belief of young-earth creationists is 6,000 years, not 600. For the record I don't think that impacts my point at all.

For the curious, that number is largely arrived at by working backward through time using the reported ages of the Old Testament prophets going back to Adam in the book of Genesis.

-4004 earth not found?

> Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist

This is one of the worst arguments against young earth creationism. You have to posit a being who can create the universe, but can't create already decayed elements.

Creationism does not want to say "magic" and admit that God is intentionally trying to deceive people. So that's why some of these responses seem silly. I mean they are, but only because the pro-creationism arguments are silly.

Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.

And yet if you ask many a young earth creationist about the dome in the heavens separating the waters above from the waters below, they will have no idea what you’re talking about¹ because they insist on literal interpretations of a text that they didn’t make it through the first page of.

⸻

1. Based on firsthand experience.

>Which then raises the idea that young earth creationism posits a God who would create a world that intentionally misleads people about its age.

Not such a good argument either. They're way ahead of you: "The lord moves in mysterious ways" and all that.

This is, of course, going to vary. There is a wide spectrum of Christian fundamentalists and related conspiracy theorists who believe in Young-Earth Creationism. Some of them are not only perfectly happy to state that God put partially-decayed elements and dinosaur bones there to test their faith; they will declare with enthusiasm that the fact that you believed in them means you failed, and are going to hell!

Others will come up with reasons why those things aren't actually what they appear to be, including but not limited to the ones who declare the entire scientific establishment to be a grand conspiracy to discredit the One True Faith.

Still others will just breeze on past it, ignoring things that they cannot understand.

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

And thus, the creator having being able to create anything at any point, yet our world having no proof of that happening, leads you to the only logical answer: either a book of abrahamic folk tales is the fundamental law of the universe, or it’s just a book.

Or Next Tuesdayism: the universe will be created next Tuesday. Your current sense of experiencing reality is merely the fabricated memory which will have existed after the universe gets created.

Thanks for this. You unintentionally gave me some acute Douglas Adams deja-vu. It sounds exactly like something he would’ve written.

Falsifyability is the key difference between a religious vs scientific claim.

> because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator

An omnipotent creator that creates lies? What else should we disbelieve from that Prince of Lies? How can we tell that now that invisible sky daddy is telling the truth this time? What about last time? Are we going to see some giant PSYCH! written in the sky?

The idea behind YEC is that God created a world which is visibly, quantifiably, and measurably 6000 years old. According to this, scientists, in their hubris, failed to see what was right in front of them, and were led astray. It’s imperative that the earth NOT appear to be older than 6000 years, because if God put forth evidence that it was that old, then he did so for a reason, and we should treat it as being that old.

This line of thinking necessarily throws out any formal systems of reasoning humans have adopted. E.g. belief in a divine creator gives little reason to believe that Newton's First Law is eternally consistent if an omnipotent being could change the "rules of the physics" at any point.

It's not even a proper argument if you think about it, because you are essentially positing logic/reasoning aren't sufficient to comprehend the reality we live in.

Yet, carbon 14 dating is one of the “gotcha” reasons that they’ll try to argue an old earth is impossible. It’s not a good faith argument from them generally though.

So our Earth was created with supposedly fake proofs that it’s much older than it really is, with no physical proof whatsoever that it is this young. A young age I might add that basically means half of civilization’s history never happened, and more than two thirds of our species’ existence.

Why? The book itself gives no reasoning or exact age for when Earth started, yet we have to believe it is fact that someone misreading that book has the exact pure date?

> Why? The book itself gives no reasoning or exact age for when Earth started, yet we have to believe it is fact that someone misreading that book has the exact pure date?

Young earth creationism is predicated on the idea that every word in the Bible is literal fact (no exceptions), so you can “calculate” the age of the earth by the genealogy accounts of ancestry from Adam to Jesus. It falls apart at any reasonable scrutiny, but like you said, it’s not rational thinking. It’s dogma for a certain group of people.

You ignored the "[SIC]" notation in order to pretend you are correcting the person you responded to.

You're "Well, ackshually..."ing, without even adding a correction. Yay.

>Physical evident strongly supports the 13-ish billion year age. Radioactive decay shows that a young earth could not exist, as there would be lots of short-lived primordial radioactive isotopes.

Well, if one ascribes to this God thing, of course Earth could just as well be created 6000 years ago, with exactly the shape and vintage material properties to appear to us as it does now.

If you can create a baby Earth from nothing, you can also just create a middle-aged Earth from nothing.

As far as I can tell, this whole experience/reality was created the moment I became conscious of it!

Right. And to take it a step further, it might have been created 3 seconds ago, with memories included :).

And i might be a Boltzmann Brain hallucinating all of this after a paticle cloud over hundreds of billions of years of random interactions by chance happened to condenced into thinking substance out of the chaos.

I don't believe that a benevolent God would create bones in the ground to trick millions of scientists into falsely believing in the existence of dinosaurs.

Like seriously, every creationist who goes with this argument really compromises on the benevolence leg of our understanding of God. Like God is some kind of trickster being who leads atheists astray on purpose or something.

So Coyote fooled all of us by becoming God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.

The benevolent God gave athiests something to entertain themselves with until they find faith.

You might enjoy reading the concept of the demiurge [1]: A lesser creating-but-not-creator deity than the ultimate benevolent god, usually portrayed as something of a deceptive character. Great rabbit hole to go down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demiurge

I know it's pretty dubious if anything could be considered a true infohazard, but Gnosticism is up there in the running. I was warned, and it is indeed a hard mindset to shake regardless of low priors.

It's a fun rabbit hole indeed.

All in all, it IMO just sets up the importance of the Council of Nicaea as well as the development of the Nicene creed.

Not a YEC, but you, the sentient being made in God's image, don't join a MineCraft world that is still a molten ball of lava/magma with no solid surface.

The analogy that jumps to mind immediately is "you get the wikipedia page by default, but have the option to explore the page's metadata (including conversations)." This feels reasonable, and how most people use wikipedia - which isn't surprising since you're often getting an LLM's output from the training on the exact same information. The complaints in the report seem to miss the point IMO, jumping to some form of artificial intelligence and applying it to what is text prediction that unsurprisingly reflects the body of human knowledge on which it is trained.

I mean christianity is a major religion and the Bible considered a major source, but that's just one of many. Does AI even consider that in 1884, meridian time personnel met in Washington to change Earth time? First words said was that only 1 day could be used on Earth to not change the 1 day bible. So they applied the 1 day and ignored the other 3 days. The bible time was wrong then and it proved wrong today. This a major lie has so much evil feed from it's wrong. In other words, 4 Earth Quadrants simultaneously rotate inside 4 Time Cube Quarters to create 4 - 24 hour days within one Earth rotation.

So many different races and religions that it's best to stick to good old secularism.

Secularism can mean a wide range of beliefs. A secularist might be a communist of fascist or a libertarian or a socialist or.....

How does race come into it at all? Religion is about belief and most religions welcome people of any race.

I suspect the comment means culture, which is frequently confused with race. But culture is also not uniform and will differ by individual etc.

Then maybe my other point applies. Secularism can exist within many cultures

In American English, “race and religion” is an old-timey expression that’s typically used as a broad identifier in a melting-pot context, eg. “We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions…” ~FDR

Some people consider secularism a religion though.

Religion relies on assumptions that cannot be proven physically, secularism just avoids those assumptions (I say this as a Christian who finds secular biblical scholarship fascinating and helpful).

Do you mean an empiricism-only view? That has its flaws as you know.

Secular humanism has been accepted as a religion for First amendment purposes.

Non theistic Buddhism is still considered a religion.

Worldview might be a better term for us to use in understanding people's first amendment rights. And also the idea that there is no neutral worldview. E.g. "secularism" is directly hostile to many religious viewpoints, and to the degree that its proponents use it to oppose religion, secularism becomes a religion/worldview/belief system.

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