Wiploc
Veteran Member
This is a question at Quora:
Human population doubles every 182 years on average since Adam & Eve were born 6000 years ago; is this proof that God exists?
I liked my answer well enough to share it here:
If we granted your premises that the world is 6000 years old, that wouldn't be even a step toward establishing the existence of your god.
I read once that, until the invention of agriculture, the earth's carrying capacity was eight million people. If so, that put a lid on population growth until we got agriculture. Humanity could be very ancient indeed, because your "clock" doesn't function before agriculture.
Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything, wrote about a volcanic winter that destroyed crops for years. For a long time after that, humanity was near extinction, having less than 20,000 members. So, once again, your smooth progression from Adam and Eve to the modern population is called into question, and any confidence we have in your calculation of the age of the earth must be likewise nearly extinct.
But it's more fun to grant your argument than to attack it. So let's do that. We shall grant your argument and see what the implications are.
According to Wikipedia, our current population is about 7.125 billion. If you want to follow along, you can put that at B2 on your spreadsheet. (B1 is the boldfaced title, Population.)
A1 is Date, and A2 is 2016.
C1 is Pop/State, or population per country. C2 is a very crude estimate: Just divide B2 by 200. I've read that we currently have 196 countries.
In column A, each cell is, per your specification, 182 years before the one above it.
In column B, again per your stipulation, each cell is half of the one above it. And column C remains 1/200th of the cell to its left.
Now just Google something like "world time line." I wound up at World History Timeline. This lets you calibrate by plugging recognized events into column D.
And so we learn that in the time of Charlemagne (800AD) there were about 50 million people on earth, which gives us only about 250,000 in France. If this seems to you implausible, it's only going to get worse.
In the time of Jesus, something like 5,000,000 total, 25,000 per country.
When Rome fought Carthage (200BC), each had a total population of 5 or 10 thousand people. Those armies must have been tiny.
When King David was succeeded by Solomon (490BC), he had 500 subjects.
When Hammurabi provided his people a written law (1800BC), his people numbered seventeen.
When Stonehenge was built (around 2300BC), there were only two people in England.
In 3000 BC, when writing was developed in Egypt, approximately nobody lived there.
In 4000 BC, when horses were domesticated and agriculture spread to Britain, there was nobody on the whole planet.
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Conclusion: Your theory is unsupportable. And it is so obviously absurd that the people who keep it in circulation cannot be ignorant of its absurdity. They lied to you.
Why would they do that? Why would they arm you with a theory that they know to be absurd? Because they don't have any better theories.
People with good arguments don't rely on bad arguments. Good arguments would drive bad arguments out of circulation--if they had any good arguments. Therefore we may conclude that they have no good arguments.
You have been lied to, but there is no shame in that. The only shame is if you are lied to, and you like it enough to go back for more.
I read once that, until the invention of agriculture, the earth's carrying capacity was eight million people. If so, that put a lid on population growth until we got agriculture. Humanity could be very ancient indeed, because your "clock" doesn't function before agriculture.
Bill Bryson, in A Short History of Nearly Everything, wrote about a volcanic winter that destroyed crops for years. For a long time after that, humanity was near extinction, having less than 20,000 members. So, once again, your smooth progression from Adam and Eve to the modern population is called into question, and any confidence we have in your calculation of the age of the earth must be likewise nearly extinct.
But it's more fun to grant your argument than to attack it. So let's do that. We shall grant your argument and see what the implications are.
According to Wikipedia, our current population is about 7.125 billion. If you want to follow along, you can put that at B2 on your spreadsheet. (B1 is the boldfaced title, Population.)
A1 is Date, and A2 is 2016.
C1 is Pop/State, or population per country. C2 is a very crude estimate: Just divide B2 by 200. I've read that we currently have 196 countries.
In column A, each cell is, per your specification, 182 years before the one above it.
In column B, again per your stipulation, each cell is half of the one above it. And column C remains 1/200th of the cell to its left.
Now just Google something like "world time line." I wound up at World History Timeline. This lets you calibrate by plugging recognized events into column D.
And so we learn that in the time of Charlemagne (800AD) there were about 50 million people on earth, which gives us only about 250,000 in France. If this seems to you implausible, it's only going to get worse.
In the time of Jesus, something like 5,000,000 total, 25,000 per country.
When Rome fought Carthage (200BC), each had a total population of 5 or 10 thousand people. Those armies must have been tiny.
When King David was succeeded by Solomon (490BC), he had 500 subjects.
When Hammurabi provided his people a written law (1800BC), his people numbered seventeen.
When Stonehenge was built (around 2300BC), there were only two people in England.
In 3000 BC, when writing was developed in Egypt, approximately nobody lived there.
In 4000 BC, when horses were domesticated and agriculture spread to Britain, there was nobody on the whole planet.
-
Conclusion: Your theory is unsupportable. And it is so obviously absurd that the people who keep it in circulation cannot be ignorant of its absurdity. They lied to you.
Why would they do that? Why would they arm you with a theory that they know to be absurd? Because they don't have any better theories.
People with good arguments don't rely on bad arguments. Good arguments would drive bad arguments out of circulation--if they had any good arguments. Therefore we may conclude that they have no good arguments.
You have been lied to, but there is no shame in that. The only shame is if you are lied to, and you like it enough to go back for more.
