Evolution is circular reasoning!

[James Brown]

It's not the age of the Earth that's the problem. It's the age of anything.

If the Earth (a great big rock) wasn't 'created' then it doesn't have an age.

4.5 billion years old? Who is saying the Earth came into existence?
13.7 billion years old? Who is saying the universe came into existence?

It's as meaningless as saying land (above or below sea level) came into existence.

Atom, Molecule, Spec of sand, Rock, Mountain, Tectonic Plate, Continent, Planet, Galaxy, Universe, Multiverse... Aren't all of these made of stuff which is the same 'age'?

The age of the universe is established by evidence. Whether or not you find the conclusion reasonable is irrelevant if we can prove it is true.

It's a valid question.

When geologists measure the age of the Earth, they use a variety of dating methods that measure radioactive decay. Radioactive elements decay into another element, and we can compare the ratio of the two elements in a sample to determine how long the decaying has been taking place. Thus, rocks are like wind-up kitchen timers that are slowly ticking down to zero (radioactively zero, that is.)

But all rocks are not equal. A radioactive clock is reset when the rock forms, which means the moment an igneous rock solidifies from magma, for example. This could have happened 4 billion years ago, when an asteroid smacked into the newly-formed Earth and melted some of the crust, or it could have happened last week week when a volcano blew.

Dating rocks is not simply measuring the age of the "stuff", the protons and neutrons themselves that make up everything. The half-life of an average proton is possibly 10³² years, many times the age of the universe, so practically speaking the protons currently sitting in a rock on my bookshelf were indeed formed during the Big Bang. But we're not dating the protons--we're dating the radioactive elements derived from some of those protons. And so far, the oldest rocks we've found in our Solar System had their clocks reset roughly 4.4 billion years ago.

 

[bilby]

The age of the universe is established by evidence. Whether or not you find the conclusion reasonable is irrelevant if we can prove it is true.

It's a valid question.

When geologists measure the age of the Earth, they use a variety of dating methods that measure radioactive decay. Radioactive elements decay into another element, and we can compare the ratio of the two elements in a sample to determine how long the decaying has been taking place. Thus, rocks are like wind-up kitchen timers that are slowly ticking down to zero (radioactively zero, that is.)

But all rocks are not equal. A radioactive clock is reset when the rock forms, which means the moment an igneous rock solidifies from magma, for example. This could have happened 4 billion years ago, when an asteroid smacked into the newly-formed Earth and melted some of the crust, or it could have happened last week week when a volcano blew.

Dating rocks is not simply measuring the age of the "stuff", the protons and neutrons themselves that make up everything. The half-life of an average proton is possibly 10³² years, many times the age of the universe, so practically speaking the protons currently sitting in a rock on my bookshelf were indeed formed during the Big Bang. But we're not dating the protons--we're dating the radioactive elements derived from some of those protons. And so far, the oldest rocks we've found in our Solar System had their clocks reset roughly 4.4 billion years ago.

^This.

Everything is made out of the same four* basic particles and their anti-particles (Up and Down quarks, Electrons and Neutrinos); plus five Bosons (Gluon, Photon, Z, W, and Higgs). These can interchange in a number of ways (for example and Up quark can decay into a Down, an Electron and an anti-Neutrino); But mass-energy is always conserved. So in that sense, all mass-energy is the same age, and has existed at least since the Planck Epoch.

But this is not what people care about when they talk about how old things are - because we don't interact with the world at the scale of quarks, or even at the scale of nucleons, atoms or molecules. We interact with systems made up of vast numbers of molecules, and these systems have certain definable properties, which can begin and end as they interact with other systems. So when we talk about the age of a rock, we are discussing how long it has had the (emergent) properties that make it a rock. It's like the trusty old broom, that has had three new heads and two new handles - it's age is determined by the length of time that the essential 'broom-ness' has existed, and cannot be determined by merely studying the age of the parts. It's a dynamic pattern in reality, just as you or I are (most of the atoms that were part of me at my birth are no longer a part of me, and I contain dozens of times more matter now than I did then, but that doesn't render the question of how old I am unanswerable).

The philosophical hurdle here is the understanding that dynamic systems can be treated as objects in their own right, and are more than the sum of their components. This is the difference between a collection of chemicals in a big heap, and those exact same chemicals arranged in the form of a human being. It is also the difference between a living human and a dead one - the dead human includes the exact same molecules, in much the same arrangement, as he did when alive; But the complex interplay of reactions between those objects has ceased to operate in the necessary cycles to keep the system running. So it stops.

This is the much vaulted 'soul' - not an object, but an interplay between objects - a dance, if you like. Asking where the soul goes after death is like asking where the dance went when the music stopped and everyone sat back down. It's an incoherent question, that is founded in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reality. The dancers are real, but the dance is only real by virtue of the dancers' coordinated movements. It is a PATTERN, and has no independent existence as a MATERIAL object.





*Plus their eight heavy cousins, and possibly some further super-heavy stuff that exist only at enormous energy densities, but these are not relevant at human scales

 

[Perspicuo]

Evolution is based on the evidence (bones, prints, DNA analysis, geology) and always comes back to it.
If you think that's circular, you don't have the first idea what empirical science is.

 

[wilson]

I hate to disagree with you, Bronzeage, but I was raised as a Creationist. I had high school teachers show me precisely how evolutionists used circular reasoning. "They date the fossils by the rocks and they date the rocks by the fossils and they date the fossils by the rocks. And they hope you won't notice the circular reasoning." We were not even told about radiometric dating, except at how unreliable it is sometimes.

But tell them that their argument is nonsense because they're using incorrect data, and they'll shrug and say, "I'm using the same data that you are, only I'm interpreting it differently through the lens of God's Holy Word." And before long, you've moved far away from a scientific discussion and into the misty halls of Philosophy, where we endlessly hash out unanswerable questions like "Is there a God?" "Is God the Creator of all things?" "Does God communicate to us through scripture?", etc.

I don't know where you got the story about dating rocks by the fossils contained in them, but it's not the way geologists do it. It is possible to say a rock layer must be from a certain age, by the fossils it contains, but that is derivative data. Once an animal's time on Earth is established, it can be used as a rule of thumb, but the same way an archaeologist might date a strata by the date of a coin he finds. None of it makes any sense if someone hasn't already figured out how old the rock was, the first time a fossil was found in it.

I've sat in Sunday school and listened to sincere people talk about the inadequacies of science and the bogosity of evolution. For the most part, that is the extent of their knowledge of geology and they are merely parroting what they have been told, not by any real study or education on the subject.

It's a basic straw man argument. They present an absurd summary and then declare it absurd, which is circular, in itself.

THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT UNDERSEER DID IN THE OP

 

[J842P]

Everything is made out of the same four* basic particles and their anti-particles (Up and Down quarks, Electrons and Neutrinos); plus five Bosons (Gluon, Photon, Z, W, and Higgs). These can interchange in a number of ways (for example and Up quark can decay into a Down, an Electron and an anti-Neutrino)...

Sometimes, I swear the people doing particle physics are just fucking with us.

 

[bilby]

I don't know where you got the story about dating rocks by the fossils contained in them, but it's not the way geologists do it. It is possible to say a rock layer must be from a certain age, by the fossils it contains, but that is derivative data. Once an animal's time on Earth is established, it can be used as a rule of thumb, but the same way an archaeologist might date a strata by the date of a coin he finds. None of it makes any sense if someone hasn't already figured out how old the rock was, the first time a fossil was found in it.

I've sat in Sunday school and listened to sincere people talk about the inadequacies of science and the bogosity of evolution. For the most part, that is the extent of their knowledge of geology and they are merely parroting what they have been told, not by any real study or education on the subject.

It's a basic straw man argument. They present an absurd summary and then declare it absurd, which is circular, in itself.

THAT IS PRECISELY WHAT UNDERSEER DID IN THE OP