People who believe in young earth creationism have completely rejected science already. They won't be convinced by any scientific argument.
this post was submitted on 27 May 2026
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I never really understood why people argue with them.
Like, take this instance as an example. They'd just say that God intentionally created pre-aged Uranium.
To whatever your detailed scientific argument may be, their argument can always be "God did it that way". You can win an argumenr against these people but you can never convice them that you did really just win the argument...
When asked why God would do such a thing, the answer is usually "To test your faith".
I was brought up Christian as a child, and went to church, but this answer is a prime example of what ultimately turned me away. Such behaviour didn't fit the image of God in my mind. My version of God was pure, loving and trustworthy, and wouldn't scatter "tests of faith" and other such trickery around my world.
Same here. Was raised by a purely Christian family, anti-abortion and anti-gay and all of that.
I may actually still be believing in their God if their answers didn't always sound like made up fits-all generic loyalist bullshit.
Religion should be a way of better, more moral living based on principles, not a weapon to impose yourself on others and justify all oppression with "it's God's will".
A lot of religious people live that way, with the philosophy/self morality being the point.
…A whole lot don’t, though.
I think it’s unfair they give good folks a bad name. But at the same time, there is way too much tolerance for that hate under the cover of “religion.”
"Testing your faith" sounds like tricking people into not believing. Which is exactly what they accuse their devil of doing. This god sounds like kind of an asshole.
My baseline argument these days is that god does not exist, or if he does exist, he is an evil asshole that gives children bone cancer.
Why would an all-knowing god need to test anything?
A kid in my neighborhood when I was growing up would always say the Devil did it to turn you away from God, but never explained how the Devil has that sort of power in the first place.
This is the whole point of "Last Thursdayism". You claim that the world was created, as it is, last Thursday. All of history, including your own memories, were fabricated at the moment of creation - which was just last Thursday. Then you challenge them to try to prove you wrong.
It's a great demonstration of why we long ago established the concept of the burden of proof
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That's not necessarily true. I managed to convert one who had doubts about the dinosaurs just by giving her information.
Some people were indoctrinated and aren't hopeless.
Speaking as someone who used to be a young Earth creationist, some of us are just born into it and are given lots of tools and incentives to maintain the faith despite, you know, all the evidence
Taking a class on the scientific method and reading a book on rationality was what got me to embrace doubt and decide that I only want to believe in something if it's true
Love of truth set me free
I once had a friend who was a Jehovah's Witness who tried to argue that carbon dating was junk science ..
Most religious idiots argue carbon dating is junk science or fake. Its like the single most commonality between every cult member.
My boss for example fully believes that the earth is 6000 years old and that carbon dating isn't real. Because and I quote "I am required by my faith to believe the earth is 6000 years old for it is in the Bible. If I do not believe it I will go to hell".
There is zero requirement for that in the Bible, that person is just an idiot who can’t understand things.
The thing is, if you're an all mighty god, you can create earth today to look like it's been here for billions of years, so these arguments are silly from the religious side. You can argue the method, but not the science.
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I grew up around young earth creationists, and was taught at school that carbon dating is inaccurate to the point of uselessness past a couple thousand years. But interestingly they did not believe in hell at all. (They just believe all non believers will be burned to death once, with finality. Not forever)
What if you die before the rapture? Do you have a short afterlife that’s just burning to your second, final death or do you squeak by with no afterlife and no burning?
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was weirdly complicated, like
- Jesus comes down
- All the dead believers are brought back to life
- All believers are taken to heaven
- Non believers are left on earth doing their own thing
- 1000 years later, Jesus comes back to earth, raises everyone else back from the dead, then burns everyone/everything
- Jesus moves heaven back to earth, which is now perfect
... Or something like that? Hard to tell which parts I got taught and which parts I hallucinated in a fever at some point
Edit: I looked it up and I am shocked at how well I remember it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh-day_Adventist_eschatology#Eschatological_events
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My boss for example fully believes that the earth is 6000 years old and that carbon dating isn't real. Because and I quote "I am required by my faith to believe the earth is 6000 years old for it is in the Bible. If I do not believe it I will go to hell".
I wonder if your boss makes any distinction in their mind between truly believing something and telling everybody you believe it's true.
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Young Earth creationists have a special response that can be used to get around any problems. "That's just the way that God made it."
So dinosaur bone fossils are down there not because an ancient animal died, but because God put the bones there like that.
When you carbon date something, if it's measured age is too large, then God made it already partially decayed when he made it.
There's no need to debate science, then. So why do they say science is wrong, when it does zero good? I think it's because they are morons.
Ahh yes, the trickster god running around with nothing better to do than bad faith tricks to getchya, completely plausible and definitely lines up with his general modus operandi from the rest of the bible!
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No, no, no. What actually happened was, Noah rounded up two of every creature to put on the ark in preparation for the great flood. But the dinosaurs -- who were totes alive at the same time as humans -- didn't get the memo. So, Noah shrugged and was like, "Oh well. You guys aren't going to fit anyways. Sayonara."
I was at the Creation Museum and Ark experience this past weekend. Wild place. According to them, there were dinos on the boat. Baby ones
Here in oklahoma we have moron dating.
Slartibartfast. (Probably spelt it wrong)
Had to look this one up. Hitchhiker's guide character for others like me...
Slartibartfast is a Magrathean and a designer of planets.[2] His favourite part of the job is creating coastlines, the most notable of which are the fjords found on the coast of Norway on planet Earth,[3] for which he won an award.
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They don't know that Satan placed pre-decayed uranium in the earth to fool the righteous.
God put Uranium in the ground to test our faith.
Uranium was used by dinosaurs to cast spells during the dark ages.
If they could read, they would be very upset.
You fools. You absolute fucking simpletons. The devil placed those decay products there to lead us astray. Pray in Jesus' name AMEN and share this with the loony "science" false believers who peddle this garbage!!;
I actually have a question on a similar topic
How does carbon dating work? Sure, things made in the past have some carbon-14 broken down, but don't the raw materials used in making today's products do just the same?
What makes carbon-14 break down differently in things made before and raw materials we use today?
As Thalfon said, the Carbon 14 decays at a predictable rate.
So where does the starting quantity come from?
Radiation from space (probably cosmic rays) interacting with the atmosphere causes some of the atoms to become a different isotope. Plants integrate C14 into their sugars and cellulose, and when they are dead and buried by sediment, no more C14 is integrated. While buried, the plant matter is sheilded from further radiation, the C14 decays at a predictable rate, and we measure that. Meanwhile, underground carbon like coal and oil is also sheilded from radiation and doesn't get converted to C14; instead any C14 decays into C12. Thus the problem with Carbon dating after the industrial revolution.
So, the reason the ratio changes in fossils is that they get underground and are shielded from radiation? But then we can only tell how long has it been sitting underground?
I don't think the burial matters. It's not random atoms that are turned into C14. It's specifically nitrogen. And I think those interactions mainly happen in the upper atmosphere with cosmic rays. So it's the atmosphere providing the shielding.
The Wikipedia page for this explains it pretty well, especially the Physical and Chemical Details section.
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Carbon-14 dating only works back to about 50,000 years, most fossils are older than that and they use radiometric dating.
(Not a scientist, I'm sure my wording will make experts cringe, but I think my gist is good)
Fossils are basically rocks that form around hard things like bones. They look at radioactive elements in the rock and figure out how much has decayed and they know when the rock was formed.
Uranium lead dating is one of the most used methods. In it, they look at zircon crystals and measure the amount of uranium and lead. Uranium decays into lead, so that tells them how long the decay has been happening.
That always seemed sketchy to me, how do they know it didn't just have a bunch of lead in it to start with? Then I learned something...
When zircon forms, lead can't bind with it and it gets pushed out of the zircon. Uranium doesn't get pushed out, so there are small pockets of uranium in fresh zircon and no lead. A million years later, we just look at how much lead and uranium there is and get a very good idea at when it was formed.
It's not that it breaks down differently (in fact, we rely on it being consistent), it's how much it has broken down. Carbon-14 has a half-life of 5700 +/- 30 years (per Wikipedia), so if you see 1/2 the expected amount of carbon-14 then something would be around 5700 years old, with 1/4 the expected amount you'd predict 11400 years old, etc.
This relies on the amount of carbon-14 originally being predictable. This worked well in the past for living things (which from what I understand tended to maintain a consistent ratio of C-14 to C-12) or objects made from their organic material, but stopped being true around the industrial revolution when we started pumping the atmosphere full of carbon.
We use other isotopes, or other techniques in general, for very recent objects, or for things more than 50-60 thousand years old.
So, living objects can regulate the amount of carbon-14 specifically, not just carbon in general? And then, knowing the ratio of carbon-14 in a living creature, we know how much time passed by? Or is it that it breaks into nitrogen that reduces the overall amount of carbon, and this is what we detect?
Because otherwise it shouldn't matter whether they died and carbon-14 broke down for a thousand years or carbon-14 broke down for a thousand years and then the recent creature consumed it. The ratio of carbon isotopes must be the same, as carbon-14 would break down anyway.
Here I assume that whatever happens with carbon-14 in fossils also happens with any carbon-14 around us. It's not that it breaks down in fossils specifically, but not in everything else. So the order shouldn't matter, unless the ratio is different in a living organism. As a matter of assumption, that is.
So, from what I understand, living things maintain (or at least prior to the industrial revolution did maintain) a predictable ratio of C-14 to C-12. I'm not super familiar with the mechanics of this, I imagine it's a case of the amount of C-14 lost matching the rate it was replaced via respiration.
Once the organism dies, it stops controlling that ratio and we can measure the decay using a sample of the material.
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Personally I believe that Adam and Even left the garden of Eden 6,000 years ago...
After hanging around eating fruit in the buff for 13.7 billion years, during which time the rest of humanity evolved from apes.
Uh huh, how else do you think apes got so much human DNA in them, .
nice try with your """logic""" and """facts""" but you fail to consider the power of my personal interpretation of a book (and by personal I mean exactly the one some sketchy pastor said), check mate WITCH
Who reads books nowadays? Don't you have a YouTube video or something that can tell me what my opinion is without leaving the house?
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Bus needs to be repainted as a church bus.
the nth day
How do I delete this comment? My Lemmy client seems not to allow it - or is it this instance?
Just modify the comment with something but shit crazy, and mod will delete it for you
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