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To: The Philosopher who wrote (3892)	12/8/2002 12:56:12 AM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 6901

Hi Christopher Hodgkin; Re my advice on maggots. It's worked every time I've tried it. (Spoken as only a mathematician could.) The concept that God would create a planet with deliberately falsified dates is difficult for a lot of people to swallow. So the ones I know argue that Carbon dating (as well as every other dating scheme) is incorrect. And the fact is that if you carbon date marijuana, grown inside in one of those homes where they provide CO2 by burning fuel oil, you will be able to show that those fresh pungent green leaves show a carbon dating of many thousands of years. To them, that proves that Carbon dating is faulty. My interpretation of the whole thing is that Carbon dating, like every other system of measuring time, has its limitations, but that overall it's accurate in the places where it is used. The most direct evidence for the earth being old would be the analysis of tree rings. But that evidence requires that you match rings between old trees and even older dead wood, so it is again subject to human error, I suppose. Before I spent most of a decade studying quantum mechanics, the subject seemed to me to be obviously flakey, if not patently false. In this and in many other subjects, it is only by becoming a member of the "in crowd" that you can learn exactly why it is that that crowd believes what it does. One of the problems for science is that they're constantly changing how old they think the earth is. The young earth types use this as evidence that science is unsure, which is true, but the fact is that none of the estimated ages (which are all only estimates), is anywhere within even one magnitude of the number that the Bible supposedly says. My stance on the Bible is that it is a document that appeared in a backwards tribe in an obscure corner of the globe several thousands of years ago. It was passed down as verbal information through many generations. If it were dictated by God, why would He include language in it that was way beyond the understanding of the men who were told it? The Bible includes no information on how to design computers or atomic weapons. This is not because God was unaware of such things, but instead was simply because the Bible is not a document describing technology or the planet. It's a document describing how humans should behave. As far as what the Bible relates on the past of the universe, why would God tell a number (10,000,000,000 years) to those wandering Jews that had no numerical representation for? Even now, in this 21st century after Christ, when we speak to children, we speak in their terms, not our own. [Conversation between two entities of differing intellectual capacity is always carried on in the vernacular of the less intelligent, which explains a lot about Silicon Investor.] Children are told that "the stork brought them", and parents can rely on the fact that while this lie is useful for ensuring that children focus their attentions on child-like things, they need not worry that their children will grow up unaware of what needs to be stuck into where. Time provides the teaching in that sort of thing. What time doesn't provide is the knowledge of the existence of God and the duties of humans, which is the primary subject of the Bible. -- Carl