- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- atheistmemes@lemmy.world
You must log in or register to comment.
Engagement bait.
this argument isn’t going to work on someone who believes god created said lead… and also, pretty sure not all lead was created from nuclear decay.
i get dunk on people feels satisfying, but this is just bad science communication through and through
I had a conversation with a woman who strongly believed God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith.
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
Anything can be radioactive if you add enough neutrons
unfortunately i don’t believe in uranium or numbers higher than 200, so this argument doesn’t work on me
Don’t give up, you can still change their mind.
Just from 4000 to 200.
“Whatever! Pssshhh!”
ALLEGEDLY .
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!
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.
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient, there is actually a way to disprove the possibility with the following paradox:
This sentence is not known to be true by any omniscient being.
There are also more traditional arguments like the problem of evil
If we assume that god, by definition, must be omniscient
Why must that be true by definition? Many of the Greek gods were clearly not omniscient, because the stories about them all involve intrigues and hiding things from each-other.
Also, you can’t disprove a god’s existence by making a logic puzzle that’s hard for you to puzzle out. Just because it’s a toughie for you doesn’t mean that it disproves the existence of gods.
That isn’t even a particularly difficult logic puzzle.
Self-referential paradoxes are at the heart of limitative results in mathematical logic on what is provable, so it seems plausible a similar self-referential statement rules out omniscience.
Greek gods are gods in a different sense than the monotheistic conception of god that is omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Sure, so the argument I give only applies to the latter sense.
That’s not a paradox though, it’s a silly logic puzzle that isn’t hard to solve. It doesn’t prove or disprove anything about omniscience or gods.
Man I don’t know if I’ll ever get over seeing Mastodon toots on Lemmy and all of the other wild cross-fediverse fun the Fediverse enables
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.
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.
Could have started with lead directly. Why go the extra mile.
“God made the world with lead in it”
Yes, it’s in your brain.
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.
https://wwwrcamnl.wr.usgs.gov/isoig/period/pb_iig.html
Lead-204 is the only isotope that doesn’t derive from radioactive decay, and it represents only 1.4% of the lead on earth.
Good bot?
In the begining, was uranium, and the uranium was not stable?
WERE YOU THERE TO SEE IT??? - The next moronic rebuttal
I assume someone saying this is a creationist and can just say god created Earth already with the lead in it. Therefore it is a pointless discussion.
Which raises the question of why he would create a planet with the illusion of age and send you to hell for falling for his own trick.
“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.
/rant
Not that it really matters, but trying to learn about (Christian) God by reading the Old Testament is like trying to perform maintenance on your 2024 vehicle using a manual from the 2000 version of that car… Like, yeah, that was relevant once, and there’s some overlap, but the situation has evolved since then. It’s called the Old Testament because it is based on something outdated (again, from a generically Christian perspective). The Old Covenant (which is what the Old Testament is testifying to) was between God and the Jews, and was based around compliance with the law. That’s why the OT is so full of rules and punishments.
Then, Jesus arrives on the scene and changed the game. His birth, betrayal, and death, represent a new contract between God and humanity (not just the Jews) wherein mankind is saved by God’s grace alone. In fact, God has done a 180 on the whole obedience to the law thing. Turns out, God loves sinners, and prostitutes, and tax collectors, and prodigal sons, and all sorts of ne’er-do-wells that the God of the Old Testament would have reviled. From the death of Jesus forward (and maybe retroactively too, I don’t know dogma all that well), the only thing necessary for your salvation is God’s grace, and that is given to all, as long as you accept God into your heart or something like that. Basically, God is Darth Vader, and he has altered the deal, pray he does not alter it further.
Of course, as with anything A) religious and B) 2000+ years old, there’s a lot of disagreement on like every aspect of the above. But, I think I’ve got the gist of it correct from a generic, if Catholicism influenced, perspective. It’s been a long time since I had to sit through a theology lecture.
With all that being said though, I imagine that the reason the OT has stuck around in Christianity is that it’s characterization of God as vindictive and capricious and obsessed with toeing the line is a very useful tool for keeping the plebs compliant. They get to have their cake and eat it too, as it were. “God loves you unconditionally sweetie, remember that, but also if you have sex before marriage you are DAMNED to HELL for ETERNITY!”
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.
lady of the pain tier deityship
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.
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.
Of course, the universe was actually created in 1970 and anyone claiming to be older than 54 is an agent of Microsoft sent to test your faith in Unix.
Half the earth was actually created in 1969. The other half was finished 12 hours later =]
The universe was created along with the release os temple os. Everything before are just memories implanted on us.
Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.
The Earth was created on January 1st, 1970 and will end on January 19th, 2038.
I remember a time when all of this happens again
We’re doing the extra-silly speedthrough right now. Next time will be much more comprehensible.
“After extensive beta testing we have decided to shelve this project. It just wasn’t working.”
All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.
Last Thursday.
I could never get the hang of thursdays
God created your with your memories as-is this morning when you woke up
I was also raised as a young earth creationist and it was always 6k years old for me but I could not begin to tell you why.
The 6,000 years comes from the lineage of Jesus as set down in the Bible with names and ages of those in his genetic line.
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.)
Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.
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.
It’s literally a poem in the original language.
So you are saying when the Bible says Jesus died for our sins, it doesn’t mean he actually died, it’s only a metaphor.
I know it’s tough to pay attention for four whole sentences but if you read them again slowly I think you’ll see that I did not use the words Jesus, sin, or metaphor in any form which should make it pretty clear that, no, I’m not saying that at all.
Even the original wording could be read as eon instead of day.
Most people don’t know that the Hebrew word “yom” (day) can be and is used to denote wildly different lengths of time.
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.
The excuse that the Hebrew word for day could mean an extremely long period of time doesn’t work because plants and trees were created before the Sun and insects (pollinators).
Thanks for that
I don’t see why God must be incompatible with evolution or the Big Bang or really any of science. God created us to be clever, surely that includes using logic and science to learn about the world.
Personally I’m agnostic and I try not to judge people. I do judge people who dismiss science and decide faith alone is better.
deleted by creator
I skimmed that link and it’s pretty interesting, I’ll have to spend more time on it. I definitely liked the part at the end about God being the observer in this context, so what’s a day to him.
Simple answers for simple minds
The original wording can’t be read as eon instead of a day because plants and trees could’t last for an eon before the sun was created.
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.
This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
Yes but this is a 16 year who watched a YouTube and owns noobs
Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.
I thought carbon dating of fossils was our best argument against the 4000 years myth.
God could have put the fossils there with the right carbon isotopes.
You can’t use logic to disprove belief in magic.
There’s a fun belief in physics regarding this “superdeterminism”.
It essentially states that two entangled particles exhibit entanglement not because of any property between them but because they share the same cause origin point (the big bang) and that their respective spin states correlate more with the big bang than each other. Essentially the spin experiments will always appear to show entanglement, but it’s actually a byproduct of the big bang.
Which, as we can all maybe agree, is fucking weak by order of being disprovable
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.
If it wasn’t a day then how did all the plants and trees live without sunlight?
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.
That still doesn’t work because plants and trees are created before the sun. Not to mention the lack of pollinators because God hadn’t yet created insects.
Clearly you’ve never played telephone.
I’m just amazed that the ancient israelis got it as close as they did to our modern understanding of the process of the formation of the universe through only oral tradition and not from any hard sources of science.
Personally I’m in the camp that says trust the science and realize that ancient Israeli tribals weren’t the best at keeping 100% accurate records.
I’m also partial to the simulation theory variant where we are the sims on Gods PC.
Got it close? It’s wrong in almost every way possible. Earth before Sun. Plants before the sun. No insect pollinators until after the sun and birds before land animals.
It’s completely random.
It blows my mind that there are atheists who read the Bible literally.
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.
That does explain why I can never get the hang of Thursdays
What, were you born today or something!
We all were! Oh wait, that’s This Thursdayism.
“God did it to trick you” is pretty hard to disprove
It’s also hard to argue while also claiming your god is moral, which is why creationists usually scapegoat the task of planting fossils to Satan.
“It Is Useless To Attempt To Reason A Man Out Of A Thing He Was Never Reasoned Into.” - Jonathan Swift
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.
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
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.
It’s an ad hoc argument. You can’t argue against any ad hoc arguments with logic
