Not to argue for creationism, but this argument sucks.
Lead can be produced by supernova, not just through decay of heavier elements. But even that's besides the point, since if you believe some entity created the universe, surely said entity could have created whatever ratio of lead to uranium they wanted. It's not a falsifiable claim, there's really no disproving it, unfortunately.
(Not so fun fact: the environmental impact of leaded gasoline was discovered by trying to estimate the age of the earth using the radio of lead to uranium in uranium deposits, but the pollution from leaded gasoline was throwing the measurements off.)
Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:
god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
God creates the moon and sun and stars. This one seems out of order to me… maybe just the earth and solar system stabilize. I don’t know how plants exist without the sun, so maybe it’s microbes or something.
God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
God creates modern land animals, then creates man and woman. That makes sense, mankind is certainly new with only a few hundred thousand years of records before civilization starts.
That doesn’t have to imply the earth is 4000 years old. Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
The Bible is a couple thousand chapters long. The creation story is the first two chapters. It's pretty obviously only attempting to establish that God created the universe in some ambiguous way and move on with the story. That doesn't stop people from inferring all sorts of things from what is essentially a poem.
If anyone is interested you can read a fine destruction of the stupid "Young Earth" argument at the link I provided.
The "Young Earth" people, both Christian and Jew, are trying to shoe horn something into the Bible that doesn't fit and doesn't need to exist. It's nothing more than a desperate attempt to hold onto an old, wrong headed, and man-made theory.
Also I'm amazed by how people don't seem to understand what half-life is. It's not the time it takes for an atom to decay. It's the time it takes for half of the atoms to decay, meaning there will be some U-238 that decay into Ra-226 in just a couple of seconds.
So even if the Earth was created 4000 years ago with uranium but not lead (for some weird reason), some of that lead would have decayed into lead by now.
The weirdest part to me is thinking the timeless omnipotent god that the Bible explicitly says considers a thousand years less than nothing actually literally meant that he created everything in what we'd perceive as 7 days when talking to whatever arbitrary scribe wrote down the creation myth for him.
So it's more like God appears to this guy named Abraham and tells him the story and then his great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great! Great, great great grandchildren wrote it down. But in the original Hebrew it doesn't use a word that means day they use a word that means unit of time.
Also, we could be way off on the age because we just don't know. Sure, we can collect data and extrapolate for billions of years and assume that all elements have always decayed at the same rate, but short of living through it and accurately measuring it with modern instruments, molecules-to-man "macro" evolution can't actually be proven.
This is why, using the Scientific Method, it is still a theory. A theory accepted by most scientists, but still. There's a certain arrogance in declaring solved something we can't actually know for 100% certainty.
Pretty sure the point of creationism is that everything was put on the earth when it was created, including fossils etc. You can't argue this with logic. My favorite spin off of this is Last Thursdayism where the earth was created last Thursday (regardless of what day it's now) which basically uses the same argument.
And the fun scientific counterpart of the Boltzmann brain. The idea that in an infinite universe (at least in a couple of the spatial dimensions if not also a time dimension) random fluctuations could combine to form your brain. Including all of your memories, thoughts, hopes and dreams. You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
When taken to its natural conclusion, the entire Earth of even the solar system or galaxy might have just been created by random chance. The perfect storm of randomness. It may have been created longer ago or just nanoseconds before now. There is no way of telling.
Thermodynamics has been used to counter and strengthen this idea. And with infinity on the table anything goes.
I always found the idea of stable Boltzmann brains fascinating. The idea that on an infinite enough universe, there must exist self-sustaining minds that function on an entirely circumstantial set of rules and logic based on whatever the quantum soup spit up.
You think you have had an entire life, but in reality your brain was just formed moments ago. And it may possibly stop existing in a few more moments, this moment being the only one the brain has actually experienced.
A moment in which I sit on the toilet and read philosophy on my fondleslab and perhaps make this comment. Really a wild thought
what an idiot, clearly god put the bones in the ground because dinosaurs were his favourite creation and he wanted us to know about them. Had he not put them there we'd have no idea, and he'd be very sad.
Some lead might have been created from supernova fusion, probably. I'm not actually sure if it's the right isotope or if lead even has radioactive isotopes that we know of
Also, the half life is when half of it decays. Some of it is constantly decaying. We don't need to wait for the half life to see any of it. The ratios would be totally off if there was enough of it to get the amount of lead we have right now, but some would exist. When the math is that complex, it's not going to change anyone's mind who believes what a magic book (written by regular humans) says. Nothing will, be if you want a chance it has to be something simple and obvious.
There are exactly 1.6 x 10^18 kilograms of lead on earth but every three minutes or so a brand new gram is welcomed into existence due to the radioactive decay of uranium.
Technically this could all be true even if the universe were created 4000 years ago. As somebody says in Robert Heinlein's novel Job: A Comedy of Justice, "Yes, the universe is billions of years old, but it was created 4000 years ago. It was created old." (approximate quote from memory)
I absolutely agree with science, but strictly speaking we can't know for sure the universe isn't the creation of some superbeing operating outside of it - or it could even be a simulation.
We can't prove that the world we live in wasn't created last Thursday, with our memories, the growth rings in trees, and so on created by a (near) omnipotent trickster to deceive us. But science and rationality give us tools for determining what's worth taking seriously, and sorting out the reasonable, but unconfirmed, claims from the unverifiable hogwash.
Actually the universe was created on Jan 1st 1970. That's why computers sometimes have errors with pre-1970 dates, it's the universal simulation glitching due to the high clock rate of computers compared to the universe's. Anyone who claims to have been born before 1970/01/01 is a simulation that's lying to you, and anyone born after is real, hence why now that its more player characters than NPCs things are going off the rails politically and socially!
Everyone knows that the universe will actually be created tomorrow. What you are experiencing now is a flashback from tomorrow of what you did yesterday. Prove me wrong.
What a tricky god to even implant memories of me imagining all of creation happening only a few seconds ago every time I read about this particular anecdote in the false past.
We can't know anything with 100% certainty. We can always imagine some razzle-dazzle, imagined scenario to counter the rational explanation if we like.
The point of the scientific method and logical reasoning is to pick the explanation with the most evidence.
The existence of a god is something that can't be disproven. You can always find gaps in knowledge and explain the gap by saying a god / multiple gods did that. As gaps narrow with more knowledge, you can always just say that the holy books were just a metaphor in this one case, but the rest of it is literally true.
It gets even more complicated when you run into people who refuse to believe in any science, or anything outside their own personal experience.
Personally, I believe the Earth is a sphere. I've been to Australia, Europe, Africa, Asia and North America. The time the flights took and the routes the in-flight maps showed make sense for a spherical earth. So did the scenes visible out the windows, and the day/night cycle. The mere existence of time zones and seasons strongly suggests the Earth is a rotating sphere tilted slightly off vertical. But, it could be that I'm living in a Truman Show world, where everything is a lie designed to make me believe something that isn't true. I haven't personally done all the math, all the experiments, etc. to prove the Earth is a sphere. And, if this were a Truman Show world, the producers of the show could mess with my experiments anyhow.
For someone who doesn't want to believe, there's really nothing you can do to make them believe. The world really relies on trust and believing Occam's Razor.
How did the matter that constitutes the universe come into being? What was the single point that signifies the beginning of time? What set time in motion? Will time continue after the death of the universe?
None of it is worth trying to wrap our tiny little monkey brains around as far as I'm concerned. Go have a pint and listen to music that makes you happy.
Iron is the heaviest element capable of being created inside stars, via fusion. Once iron is fused, the star begins to rapidly collapse.
Elements heavier than iron (28) are the result of supernova explosions, which produce energies high enough to create these heavier atoms. It is further possible, as described in the image, for very heavy elements to decay into lighter more stable elements, those still being heavier than iron.
That's what I learned in school, but there's been some research since suggesting stars produces significant quantities of elements up to lead during their lifetimes, even though it's a net energy loss.
No. Nucleosynthesis of lead within stars generated from supernovae make up the bulk of the existing lead on Earth. Uranium decay does provide some additional lead inventory but would be fairly small in comparison.
But the presence of it in the first place within second generation stars proves that lead is billions of years old.
When I was being raised as a young earth creationist, the earth was supposedly 12,000-20,000 years old. Then it was 10,000 years old. Then only 6,000. After I outgrew that nonsense, I joked that in a few decades YECs would say that their god created the earth in 1980, and anyone older than 40 are agents of the devil sent to test your faith.
6,000 to 12,000 years old is what I heard. I'm guessing that this "Christians Against Science" page is a joke community that is making fun of YECs by saying it's 4,000.
Yeah, this is broken because all lead did not have to come from polonium, that's how half-lives work.
It's still 100% bullshit in every way, someone just needs to have chatgpt4 sort out the current mass fraction to explain why, I'm way too lazy to argue against insanity.
Was going to say exactly that, not all lead came from radioactive decay. So this kind of ruins their debunk, Earth's age has been measured by the amount of lead.
Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There's no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old
But that still doesn't change the belief that a creator could have created the universe in whatever state it currently exists in. That's why these arguments never go anywhere with hard core young earth creationists. It's also not worth the energy arguing with them because they often believe that anyone trying to convince them otherwise is an antichrist trying to lead them astray.
the answer completely disregards the fact that people who even remotely understand how these things work wouldn't believe stupid shit in the first place. there are so many ways for this guy to just dismiss this.
how would you even know, you can't have studied these for billions of years
who says lead only can exist in this manner
what if this is true but god also made lead along with the earth
etc etc... this is very weak if the goal is really try to convince this guy to look into some things rather than smell your own farts.
yeah the insistence that creation must mean it happens in an instant is just demonstrably pointless. we already say god created us. and we know we don't come into existence in full adult form in an instant. we have a whole birth-baby-toddler-kid-teen-adult transformation. and before that we know there is a whole process in the womb. so when god creates a person he puts an entire process into motion. why can this not be the case for the entire universe? why not evolution? are they saying that god couldn't have thought of a system? I find it weird.
You can throw as much science at them as you want. God could have just created everything in whatever state he wanted to. Same thing with the virgin mary discussion. Who cares if it makes sense scientifically, god can just make a fertilized egg appear. How lame would god be if he could not do that? This is the basis christians start from, so why even bother trying to debate that?
Counter handwave, any god that would do that is a jerk who doesn't deserve worship. (Actually like 99% of the shit most faiths deities do falls into that category.)
In the holy book, inspired by this god, he tells you he DOES deserve worship. Furthermore, were you to ignore his advice, he will punish you eternally.
"for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God" - Exodus 20:5
Says it all, really. This whole character trait is that he's a jealous little asshole. He's like Dolores Umbridge.
I'm aware Christians may make counter-claims, but I've read the old testament, and all he does is to come off as an absolute asshole - you either worship me, or else!
I wasn't too surprised (but it made sense) that he (Elohim) originally came from the Canaanitic pantheon. How else can you be the only god, yet people shouldn't worship other gods? He's not, that's how.
And use his omnipotent power to hide from you while watching your life play out in exactly the way his omniscience let him know it would before he even created the earth or you.
Because believers will listen to Christianity's divinely inspired interpretation of the Bible that says that. Non-christians won't listen to that. Therefore anyone who believes the earth is older has rejected Christianity. He did it to help identify the non-believers because he's a petty bitch.
I always found it funny how they'll sometimes try to justify their claims scientifically to give it an air of legitimacy. If god created the stars close to one another and expanded them to fill the sky over a single day, the skies would be dark for billions of years. A YEC could easily say "oh well god put the light there to make the stars look like they've been in the sky for a long time" but very often they just don't have an answer because they didn't think of one. Unfortunately, there's almost that will stop them from doubling down on their beliefs and just becoming more prepared for the next person they talk to
The debate between Bill Nye and a creationist is so rage inducing. It's a terrible premise and the fact that Bill even agreed to it gave the creationist credit.
The original post only gave half the explanation. It’s not that lead exists in general, it’s that lead exists within zircon crystals.
Under normal circumstances that would be impossible, zircon crystals strongly reject lead atoms as they form. There’s no way to stuff lead into the crystal lattice in the quantity we find them there. But uranium and zircon go together just fine, we just have to wait for it to decay into lead. The trouble is it takes ~4.5 billion years for just half of those uranium atoms to turn into lead. So any zircon crystal we find with half as much lead as uranium must be roughly that old
Actually He started with lead. All life comes from lead. Praise the lead. It's not lead poisoning, it's lead salvation! Also Led Zeppelin is Christian rock and spreading the gospel.
A normal Star, which does not end it's life with a supernova, can only produce elements up to Iron with normal fusion. All other elements are produced by e.g. supernovas, which tend to produce heavier elements initially (due to the forces involved) hat decay over time.
At least that is my pseudoscience knowledge about this
The problem with this argument from the fundamental level is that 99% of religious zealots don't give two shits about your science or facts. There is a whole segment of the human population that has no mind for factual information and just decides to believe whatever they feel.
There is no real arguing with these people, they don't care about evidence or science, I am quite convinced they don't even understand things the same way as other people and don't have an internal mind-voice that works the same way as other people. It's just a totally different conscious experience, and despite making full use of our science and technology, they don't exist in a world where that matters.
The hard part about this understanding is you realize there's no resolution. They can't be changed because they're not unsatisfied with their world. A smart person is never satisfied and will always ask questions and even ask questions about the questions. Not these people. They actively are annoyed by questions and even see learning things as a kind of sin or spiritual crime.
So lets save our collective energy and instead focus on making classrooms better funded and knowledge available and unavoidable for the younger children growing up in this world and still developing their minds. I was pulled out at an early age simply by finding a few science books, others can be too.
I'm not even sure how you get to 4000 years old from biblical literalisim.
Edit: going strictly by the biblical account, Adam lived to 930 years, and Noah 950. IIRC, their lives did not overlap. Jesus lived 2000 years ago. A whole bunch of stuff happens in between Noah and Jesus. So even if you're working strictly from the bible, how the hell do you get 4000 years?
There is a very old Jewish Holiday which celebrates new year on a calendar starting with the creation of the Universe, only about 5000+ years, but even that is obscure af.
Ussher calculated 4004BC as the start of the universe, which would be about 6000 years ago.
That's my point. Most YEC point to 6000 years. Even within their own framework, I don't see how you get to 4000 years. My best guess is they saw 4004BC and forgot that 1 BC was about 2000 years ago.
I was a YEC before going to university. I studied geology. After two years, I accepted that evolution happened. After four years, I was an atheist. I went on to get a doctorate, and I have published quite a few papers about rocks that are >2 billion years old.
As a kid, there were literally 0 authority figures in my life that accepted that evolution happened. It was taken as a given that it was ridiculous. My biology teacher skipped the chapter on evolution, saying, “this is controversial.”
Patience, love, and making critical information available gives kids like I was a chance.
I mean, the existence of lead doesn't necessarily prove the age of the earth so much as that those elements have existed for that long.
HOWEVER -- you're basically guaranteed to find lead in uranium deposits found around the earth, and the ratio of lead/uranium is how we calculated the 4.6 billion years.
Uranium is formed in Neutron stars or Supernova, so at the very least - the uranium found on earth itself is 4.6 billion years old. Whether "Earth" was "Earth" back then, who knows. This could be pre-moon? Could be before the earth even cooled down to have a solid outer layer? So the estimate is bound to be off by a little...
Just not by 4.5 billion years.
I'm pretty sure just soap has been around for more than 4.5k years and that means civilization too. So even if you do some backflips in justification here, there's no way you get 4k.
I typically use the fact that there are trees older than 4000 years old based on tree ring data. Or that there are stars in the sky further than 4000 light years away that we can see in the sky.
That usually makes them say something like how their God created an world that was already aged. So I usually counter with the fact that would make their God a lier and deceiver.
Some hold firm and say God did it to test faith. Others back pedal and try to blame it on Satan. That Satan scattered all this false evidence just to make us question the notion that Earth is 4000 years old to make people lose faith in God. And then I have to laugh at how stupid their argument is and how weak their God is. Naturally no amount of evidence or logic will make them change their belief.
The important thing is, you're compelling people to examine their pre-existing beliefs. They won't change their beliefs during your conversation, because deprogramming takes time. But the more seeds of doubt you plant, the better the chances are that some will germinate.
I find that the most effective way to encourage people to question themselves is to discuss things calmly and in good faith, through in-person conversations. Challenging people to "convert me" has been surprisingly fruitful - after all, I honestly would love to believe that a benevolent deity is looking out for us all. (As well, tons of believers would equally love to be the one who "shows [you or me] the light.") I want them to provide compelling evidence that can change my mind.
Approaching the conversation in this fashion not only challenges the "missionary" types to think harder, but it also shifts the onus onto them to convince you. If they've never thought critically about their message, this kind of conversation may introduce questions that stick with them long after it's over.
And even better because they start to come to their own thought-out conclusions. There's less baggage in the way for them to eventually work their way through it. Especially when they've got to convince you - because mysteriously they always jump to all of this "proof" to show you.
It doesn't happen immediately, and if you try to speed it up you'll just cause them to reverse course.
I'll sprinkle a little bit of ... my own confusion into the mix? As an example, I'll remain interested, but be like "wait, you said X but then you said Y - doesn't that contradict X?" I'll let them explain and not fight them on it, but send them off with a warm smile.
Not everyone will break free of the programming, but some will - and that's all I can hope for.
Lead 204 is entirely primordial and the other isotopes found on earth would be found at roughly the same concentration were all of the lead on earth primordial. It's the excess ratios of the other isotopes of lead that can be attributed to radioactive decay. That is a substantial proportion of the lead on earth, but to say the "existence of lead" is proof of the age of the earth is entirely incorrect.
But the half life of polonium 210 is just 138 days. other is a few days. radium 226 is 1602 years. Why couldn't the earth have started with a lot of radium 226? Checkmate round earthers.
There's evidence of human civilization and agriculture going back at least 10,000 years. You have to be extremely willfully ignorant to think the earth is only 4,000 years old. Hell the pyramid of Giza is older than that.
The craziest thing is new archeological discoveries keep pushing modern humans further and further back into pre-history. Almost makes me wonder if we'll come full circle and go "yeah humans did in fact coexist with dinosaurs, and here's proof at least one rode one" /hj
Yeah this doesn’t do squat to prove or disprove anything to these nutters.
I’ve done the same with a variety of other things and you will get told the same thing:
God put it here.
Thing is you cannot argue with the above statement because it falls into that sort of argument you used to have when you were a child when the other kid would say ‘Nyah! Last word!!’ or ‘I can’t hear you!!’
I had a dude come up to me at the reference desk and tell me that the earth can’t be billions (he said trillions, lol) of years old because erosion from the Mississippi River would make it wider and deeper than it is. I pulled up some info including the idea that the Mississippi was something that came about more recently because of plate shifting, etc and he just said, "Nah."
Radioactive decay is not the only way to make lead, and lead is produced in much greater abundance than uranium.
The part that's missing in the post is in looking specifically at uranium deposits and making assumptions about the initial composition of the deposits, since the crystalline structure excludes lead when the crystals form. So if you detect lead contained within zircon, it is assumed to be the product of radioactive decay.
This would mean that there was more uranium around millions and billions of years in the past so why isn't there any evidence of prehistoric nukes in the fossil record
Probably not willingly. Republican States are often horrible at updating infrastructure, and due to the lack of a well educated population, they don't suffer much repercussion for that. Very high chance they grew up with or still have lead pipes.
This is false, the Flying Spaghetti Monster in his infinite noodly wisdom and power created the world yesterday and made the Earth appear billions of years old and the universe appear even older.
Young earth creationists make up new element called "creationite" from which all elements came from, thereby filling in the radioactive decay plot hole in their narrative.
To a theist, all things are the creation of god. There's no argument that can't be settled as "god made it that way". The real place you gotta hit em is in the arrogance of believing that the almighty created the bible, not humanity. And if they say that a sentient entity willed it thusly, then we return to the problem of evil: if humans are capable of evil, and this is god's will, then the benevolent god in the bible is not accurately depicted. I wonder what else the bible got wrong? Maybe their god willed the creation of a bible that got stuff wrong on purpose?
Honestly, for a dystheistic spiritualist (that is to say, one who believes that the greatest ordering forces of the universe are neither good nor bad nor have any intention for us, yet recognize the importance of spirituality in human livelihood) who is conversing with a bible thumper, this is the best you can do. Help people depart from their idols and attachments, and connect with the real human experiences of the spiritual. The less we get distracted with rules and traditions, the more we can love our world and one another.
Scientism is not equal to science. Scientism is a way of thinking that's similar to a religion with saint texts written in physics and biology. It denies religion, while preserving its very structure. The meme is a good example of it.