Mount Everest and the Age of the earth

[Gman]

IF you think this information was a bit misleading perhaps I should post what I just read about Everest moving northeast at 12-24 inches per year.

Just let me know when it'll be in the Washington DC area and I'll make the effort to take a look as it goes by ......

Hey it just passed California... (sorry).

[NewCreature2]

Ha!

I really did read that. Here is an article that attempts to answer my original question. It is somewhat biased in my opinion it attempts to force the disconnect into a presupposed theory. In any event perhaps it will clarify what issues I have with the given time frame for the formation of the mountian.

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/himalaya.html

When India rammed into Asia about 40 to 50 million years ago, its northward advance slowed by about half. The collision and associated decrease in the rate of plate movement are interpreted to mark the beginning of the rapid uplift of the Himalayas. The Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau to the north have risen very rapidly. In just 50 million years, peaks such as Mt. Everest have risen to heights of more than 9 km. The impinging of the two landmasses has yet to end. The Himalayas continue to rise more than 1 cm a year -- a growth rate of 10 km in a million years! If that is so, why aren't the Himalayas even higher? Scientists believe that the Eurasian Plate may now be stretching out rather than thrusting up, and such stretching would result in some subsidence due to gravity.

[NewCreature2]

I'd be interested in your thoughts and reactions to what is there.

http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/yeclaims.html

Best Regards,

Bart

Hi. Well my thoughts are that the article capitulates that the lowest common denominator of scientific thought is most likely to be truth. IT is also plainly written in opposition to a particular age of the earth. This is plain from the title, it would read quite differently if it had been written for something. To relate this back to the topic, I would ask what natural laws would one be going against to suggest that Everest took 100,000 years to form rather than to suggest that it took hundreds of million years. This is a huge difference.

What is it that requires the earth to be 6 billion years old. The age of 6 billion years has become the holy grail for modern science. IT is crazy to capitulate a theory as fact whenever interpreting any observation. Take the article I linked in my last post. IT even goes so far as to interpret as facts that Asia must be squashed by gravity and spread out because the mean age of the earth from within science must be true, so therefore everest couldn't have actually formed 100,000 years ago.

I am always astounded by the reasoning that the Great Creator God who made all we see in its wonder and order can not author a book that can be easily comprehended and does in fact mean what we think it does. I don't accept that only the wisest and most enlightened among us can fathom what the Bible says. I think that God is most able to communicate with his creation and that a plain reading of his inspired word is more likely to be truth than the generally accepted theories of the politically correct factions of science with there eyes on it's holy grail. The 6 billion year age of the earth colors all the interpretations because science works from it as an assumption of truth.

The theory is becoming combersome and poorly predicts and interprets. Rather than observations showing us that age of the earth is 6 billion years, 6 billion years has become the key to interpreting observations. AS far as I am concerned a plain reading of Genesis simply indicates that when man was created the earth was already here, so for me, it suffices to say that according to man's perspective the earth has always been here. Perhaps it was here 5,000 years before, perhaps 50,000, perhaps 500,000, perhaps 5,000,000. I simply don't see what requires it to be 6 billion years rather than some other figure. The only reason it is so is becuase of an appeal to the popular opinion as most likely to be truth.

[Canuckster1127]

I'd be interested in your thoughts and reactions to what is there.

http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/yeclaims.html

Best Regards,

Bart

Hi. Well my thoughts are that the article capitulates that the lowest common denominator of scientific thought is most likely to be truth. IT is also plainly written in opposition to a particular age of the earth. This is plain from the title, it would read quite differently if it had been written for something. To relate this back to the topic, I would ask what natural laws would one be going against to suggest that Everest took 100,000 years to form rather than to suggest that it took hundreds of million years. This is a huge difference.

What is it that requires the earth to be 6 billion years old. The age of 6 billion years has become the holy grail for modern science. IT is crazy to capitulate a theory as fact whenever interpreting any observation. Take the article I linked in my last post. IT even goes so far as to interpret as facts that Asia must be squashed by gravity and spread out because the mean age of the earth from within science must be true, so therefore everest couldn't have actually formed 100,000 years ago.

I am always astounded by the reasoning that the Great Creator God who made all we see in its wonder and order can not author a book that can be easily comprehended and does in fact mean what we think it does. I don't accept that only the wisest and most enlightened among us can fathom what the Bible says. I think that God is most able to communicate with his creation and that a plain reading of his inspired word is more likely to be truth than the generally accepted theories of the politically correct factions of science with there eyes on it's holy grail. The 6 billion year age of the earth colors all the interpretations because science works from it as an assumption of truth.

The theory is becoming combersome and poorly predicts and interprets. Rather than observations showing us that age of the earth is 6 billion years, 6 billion years has become the key to interpreting observations. AS far as I am concerned a plain reading of Genesis simply indicates that when man was created the earth was already here, so for me, it suffices to say that according to man's perspective the earth has always been here. Perhaps it was here 5,000 years before, perhaps 50,000, perhaps 500,000, perhaps 5,000,000. I simply don't see what requires it to be 6 billion years rather than some other figure. The only reason it is so is becuase of an appeal to the popular opinion as most likely to be truth.

Thanks for the response. You have some valid points.

1. Clearly the article is written to refute Young Earth Creationism. I don't think that's a bad thing. My experience and observation with a YEC position is that it is basically dishonest at worst or inconsistent at best in how it approaches issues in science. YEC claims to start with the Scriptures and makes its case and decision there. The science is really just fluff designed to obfuscate the issue. The reason I say this is because when many of these issues are later addressed, the YEC proponent will simply move on to other ones and not digest the information or adjust their viewpoint. I think it is somewhat disingenuous to present scientific arguments and then not deal with the implications when the argument presented is shown to be fallacious.

2. Once you move from a YEC position to an Old Earth Creationist position, the degree of age represented in the periods of time represented by the 'yoms' (the Hebrew word used in Genesis which is translated into most english translations as Day) doesn't really matter. The age as determined by science isn't the point so much. I happen to believe that the ages determined by science are reasonably accurate, but I wouldn't be phased by a major change in that regard. An OEC position despite the accusations of some on the YEC side, isn't really about coming up with a way to rationalize and back into science by compromising the text of Genesis. For many OEC proponents that certainly may a factor in what triggers their re-evaluating their understanding of Genesis. For me that was the case, but what I came to understand was that the problem wasn't that Genesis was wrong but that the hermeneutic being used to established a YEC in the first place was not just bad science, but more importantly it was bad theology. Science doesn't drive OEC per se. It fits better, which I think is significant, but more importantly the scripture is not tortured into assuming a context it was not originally intended by God to do.

3. What makes the age proposed in general by science in this regard as somewhat convincing to me is that is supported from several different disciplines with similar results coming out. That's more than a coincidence in my opinion. The wild card still out there is that there is not yet a viable "theory of everything" tracing back to what is known in physics as the singularity which effectively explains all we observe and can predicts things moving forwar. There's a tremendoud amount of information yet to come and amazing new discoveries taking place even now. The whole range of information and implications with regard to dark matter boggles my mind. Until such time as a plausible theory is established (assuming it doesn't reframe the entire question entirely too which is a possibility) I think it is entirely reasonable to hold back on absolute acceptance of all science has to offer in terms of the philisophical implications of the question, even if I think the practical extensions of science in this regard has yielded some pretty clear and practical things that demonstrate that they have a pretty good handle on many of the physical attributes of this universe.

OEC in the end doesn't require accepting everything science or scientists have to offer. It doesn't start from a position of conflict however, either. We seek to understand and reconcile where we can, admit where it can't be done yet and recognize that while science is the more volatile field in terms of change, there needs to be some humility in looking at how we approach and understand the Bible. The Bible doesn't change. Our understanding can and should however, when the text itself leaves room and questions that aren't always addressed solely by Scripture.

Does that make sense to you?

Regards,

Bart

[Himantolophus]

The theory is becoming combersome and poorly predicts and interprets. Rather than observations showing us that age of the earth is 6 billion years, 6 billion years has become the key to interpreting observations. AS far as I am concerned a plain reading of Genesis simply indicates that when man was created the earth was already here, so for me, it suffices to say that according to man's perspective the earth has always been here. Perhaps it was here 5,000 years before, perhaps 50,000, perhaps 500,000, perhaps 5,000,000. I simply don't see what requires it to be 6 billion years rather than some other figure. The only reason it is so is becuase of an appeal to the popular opinion as most likely to be truth.

does it matter if it's 5000, 50,000, 5 million, or 5 billion? Do you know for sure what God meant to say? Science is Man's attempt to find out the truth.

The theory is FAR from cumbersome and poorly predicting! Plate tectonics is remarckably good at predicting past events. we can trace the movement of continents for millions and millions of years and the rocks and fossils all conform to it. If modern geological is "poor" then I don't want to know what YEC thoery is. Why would you place your faith in a theory with no actual evidence?

As for the writing of Genesis for the common man... the "common man" back then did not know about ANY of the sciences (biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy), or the fact that the Earth was round and floating in space. So you've basically answered your own question. God gave the authors of Genesis the most simplified, "dumbed down" explanation of what REALLY happened. Either that, or the creation story was simply a Christian adaptation of another creation story. Notice that all creation stories are different in some way. The danger of the PLAIN reading of Genesis is that you blindly accept a story that really has nothing to do with what really happened. The sotry may make more sense if you read into it more abstractly, and I think that's what OEC's try to do.

Which gets back to the point. You have no proof what God really meant to tell those people back then. It is painfully obvious that the Universe is NOT 6000 years old and all the creatures were not put on this Earth at the same time. There was no global flood, although Noah's Ark seems based on an ancient local flood. Unless YEC can find evidence to support their own theories, they will continue to attack evolution and Old Earth.

The age of Everest is only a single piece in the puzzle of putting together geologic history. Many convergent lines of evidence point at the age of the mountain and it didn't just push up instantaneously 6 million years ago. It was a slow, gradual process. The actual Everest may have actually rose 3 millions years ago, 6 million is an estimate. Geology is everchanging and is nver the same for long. There are fossils on the top of Everest which correlate with the fossils in the old Tethys Sea (this leads to age) and dating methods have dated the rock to that age as well.

[NewCreature2]

What makes the age proposed in general by science in this regard as somewhat convincing to me is that is supported from several different disciplines with similar results coming out. That's more than a coincidence in my opinion.

Does that make sense to you?

Regards,

Bart

Hi Bart. Just wanted to respond to a couple of points.

I would agree that it is not coincidence that several disciplines show similar results. It is a forgone conclusion that when one forgoes the conclusion that the earth is the age of 6 billion years that observations will be interpreted as if the processes happened over that time period. The distance India traveled, it's speed of drift, and the time frame for everest uplift are functions of the conclusion that the earth is 6 billion years old. What observation requires this? Conclusions and theories are not evidence.

I completely understand, and it does indeed make sense how one came come to the conclusion that the general agreement of science is most likely to be truth. IT is a fallacy to forego it as a conclusion because of its simple popularity in the volumes of theories, but it is not entirely unreasonable.

[zoegirl]

IT is a fallacy to forego it as a conclusion because of its simple popularity in the volumes of theories, but it is not entirely unreasonable.

The old age of the universe is not accepted because it is popular and therefore they find evidence.

The old age of the universe is accepted because of the mountains of evidence and therefore accepted.

There are plenty of Christian scientists who do not have a philosophical reason for accepting an old earth. If there were evidence for a young earth, they would gladly support it.

[Himantolophus]

IT is a fallacy to forego it as a conclusion because of its simple popularity in the volumes of theories, but it is not entirely unreasonable.

yes, it is a fallacy to do this but science is not a popularity contest. There is no agenda to push this idea nor is science in any atheist pockets. The information they gather and theories they conclude with are well supported by both past and current data. The fact that literature is usually peer-reviewed allows scientists to weed out the crap and get to the good stuff quicker and with fewer costly errors. Not to say that scientists aren't willing to change their minds but progress is what science is all about!

[NewCreature2]

does it matter if it's 5000, 50,000, 5 million, or 5 billion? Do you know for sure what God meant to say? Science is Man's attempt to find out the truth.

Well it matters in that it cannot be all of those ages. As I said it matters little to my conclusion that the earth has always been here from man's perspective. I am not the authority on what God meant to say, nor would I try to put words in God's mouth. I feel he meant to say exactley what he said, which is why I am a proponnent of plain reading and reject the idea that it was dumbed down, or that we need to inject our own wisdom into what God wrote.

The theory is FAR from cumbersome and poorly predicting! Plate tectonics is remarckably good at predicting past events. we can trace the movement of continents for millions and millions of years and the rocks and fossils all conform to it. If modern geological is "poor" then I don't want to know what YEC thoery is. Why would you place your faith in a theory with no actual evidence?

I don't place my faith in scietific theory, not my own feeble attempts at explanation, nor popular science. Plate tectonics does nothing more than theorize that the earths crust is factures into 6 large plates and numerous smaller ones. IT theorizes what may be happening at boundaries and helps to explain sea floor spreading, subduction, plate colissions and uplifts, volcanoes, earthquakes, plumes, etc, etc. I have no problem with this. These forces that explain observations don't require the earth to be 6 billion years old, any more than they require the earth to be 2,422,693 years 4 months 12 days and 14.2 hours. Now it is plain to see that popular science attempts to show how plate tectonics could have worked during the last 6 billion years, but these are simple conclusions and interpretations based upon a foregone conclusion.

Which gets back to the point. You have no proof what God really meant to tell those people back then. It is painfully obvious that the Universe is NOT 6000 years old and all the creatures were not put on this Earth at the same time. There was no global flood, although Noah's Ark seems based on an ancient local flood. Unless YEC can find evidence to support their own theories, they will continue to attack evolution and Old Earth.

I was not aware I was attacking, perhaps I have been over flamboyant in voicing that I don't see the requirement for it to be 6 billion years because we see observations. Conclusions and explanations are not evidence. I'm not certian what observation you refer to that make it painfully obvious that the earth is not 6000 years old. In any event why the restriction from 6 billion years clear back to 6000 years? Would it also be painfully obvious that the earth is not 250,000 years old?

The age of Everest is only a single piece in the puzzle of putting together geologic history. Many convergent lines of evidence point at the age of the mountain and it didn't just push up instantaneously 6 million years ago. It was a slow, gradual process. The actual Everest may have actually rose 3 millions years ago, 6 million is an estimate. Geology is everchanging and is nver the same for long. There are fossils on the top of Everest which correlate with the fossils in the old Tethys Sea (this leads to age) and dating methods have dated the rock to that age as well.

I am well aware of explanations and theories that are a direct result that the earth must be 6 billion years old. These are not evidence, they are interpretations driven by capitulation to other unproven theories. Correlation of similar fossils at two places doesn't require the causation you suggest. Too much of "evidence" is found in discussions of scientific experimentation. I would suggest that theoies are cheap and easily taint further research.

[NewCreature2]

IT is a fallacy to forego it as a conclusion because of its simple popularity in the volumes of theories, but it is not entirely unreasonable.

The old age of the universe is not accepted because it is popular and therefore they find evidence.

The old age of the universe is accepted because of the mountains of evidence and therefore accepted.

There are plenty of Christian scientists who do not have a philosophical reason for accepting an old earth. If there were evidence for a young earth, they would gladly support it.

I guess I understand what you are saying, but I do not agree with it. Since the old age of the earth is accepted further research is interpreted as if it were a fact lending credence to what should otherwise be considered speculation and theory.

There is very little evidnce of any kind whatsoever to indicate the earth is a particular age. The vast majority of so called evidence has indeed risen from philosophical assumptions that the earth is extrememly old. Since EVERYTHING is being interpreted as if the world is old, then what we now know it to be true?

IT is simple to say their are mountians of evidence, care to share any of it. LEts start with Everest in this thread and perhaps branch out. What observation on everest requires the earth to be more than say 50,000 years?

[Canuckster1127]

There is very little evidnce of any kind whatsoever to indicate the earth is a particular age. The vast majority of so called evidence has indeed risen from philosophical assumptions that the earth is extrememly old. Since EVERYTHING is being interpreted as if the world is old, then what we now know it to be true?

I disagree with this completely. The evidence relating to the age of the earth and the universe is pretty overwhelming and consistent from many perspectives. In fact, the perspective on this historically did not begin with these type of ages and spans. The presumption was younger and has moved to the current estimates because of the extrapolation of evidence such as red-shifting patterns in celestial light, radioactive isotope degeneration rates to name just two.

In fact, from my perspective, and I've been on both sides of the discussion at different times, the idea of a presumption of truth going in search of evidence is far more descriptive of the YEC position and pattern as evidenced by my earlier comments relating to the YEC habit of throwing our scientific "proofs" which when disporved are simply abandoned and new ones adopted as if the previous discussion never took place.

The onus of proof in this situation is upon the one making the claim. What evidence do you have to, for example, establish a value of 50,000 years on the ascent of Everest?

[zoegirl]

http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth ... verse.html

THis is about the most comprehensive list I have seen concerning the evidence for an old earth.

If I may anticipate a question or comment. The fact that the numbers are different do not indicate contradictions in the data

[NewCreature2]

The presumption was younger and has moved to the current estimates because of the extrapolation of evidence such as red-shifting patterns in celestial light, radioactive isotope degeneration rates to name just two.

Just a couple more points. Extrapolation of evidence is of course not evidence at all it is interpretation. Let's take redshift it suggests that the universe is expanding how does this REQUIRE the earth to be 6 billion years old? Couldn't the universe be expanding and the earth be some other age?

Radioactive isotope degeneration rates do not require the earth to be 6 billion years old. Yes it is known that radioactive isotopes decay at a rate this proves nothing other than unstable elements decay.

I guess I fail to see your point that these two things among others require ourr current estimate.

[NewCreature2]

What evidence do you have to, for example, establish a value of 50,000 years on the ascent of Everest?

None. I don't think there is any evidence that can establish the begining of the ascent of everest. As I have proposed before growth rates and the fading of the intitial force that caused India to crash into Asia suggest that the mountian is not as old as some suggest.

[Canuckster1127]

The presumption was younger and has moved to the current estimates because of the extrapolation of evidence such as red-shifting patterns in celestial light, radioactive isotope degeneration rates to name just two.

Just a couple more points. Extrapolation of evidence is of course not evidence at all it is interpretation. Let's take redshift it suggests that the universe is expanding how does this REQUIRE the earth to be 6 billion years old? Couldn't the universe be expanding and the earth be some other age?

Radioactive isotope degeneration rates do not require the earth to be 6 billion years old. Yes it is known that radioactive isotopes decay at a rate this proves nothing other than unstable elements decay.

I guess I fail to see your point that these two things among others require ourr current estimate.

I agree with you. You are failing to see the point.