Ok, so I can't leave it alone... stupid me....
absurd... You say "Creation theory can be disproved because it asserts a very specific time line. ", and then assert your own subjective view of time, the "proof" for which is also based on a teeny sliver of human observation filtered through human subjectivity.
You have no proof that that the "rules" we have now have always been or even will be in 20 minutes. To say that the decay of a particular element is a perfect predictable based upon what we know is silly, given the inability to observe such decay for any reasonable amount time or physical circumstances.
Actually if you bothered to read I demonstrated multiple different ways that the universe's age is absolutely verifiable from multiple tests that are completely unrelated. But as per the norm with religious freaks (and yes, I don't know that you're a religious person, but regardless of your religion or otherwise, your views are in parallel with religious freaks and thus it's largely irrelevant to the discussion if you are actually or not) that desperately want to believe the lies in the bible (or whatever else they want to believe that has no proof and can be disproved completely and utterly) and latch on to one thing... I'm surprised you didn't trot out the snail shell example about radio carbon dating.... the fraud would have been complete.
As for your "subjective view of time" BS. Time is not subjective, it is absolute based on the rules outlined by the General Theory of relativity (I guess I should have explained it to you, although it probably wouldn't have done any good). There is nothing mysterious about time, and it can be explained without the use of perspective. That's the beauty of mathematics, as I pointed out before. General Theory of relativity explains almost all of the properties of time. It does so with mathematics, and no one has ever proven any part of it wrong. They have refined it, and gone into areas that Einstein didn't bother to, or wasn't capable of doing, but they have never contradicted it. Given the specific criteria outlined in GTR you can absolutely predict time without perspective. As a result, you can also predict exactly how light will behave. And there is this neat thing called distance dating based on the constant of light. It assumes that light is a constant in a vacuum so long as it isn't affected by large gravity wells. In fact, we interestingly (not so interestingly for religious nuts) use this principle of light bending when traveling through large gravity wells and other substances all of the time, both in astrophysics and other areas. But one that most religious nuts forget about is that we can TELL when light has been bent, or sped up or slowed down through different substances. Thus we can be absolutely sure when we do our calculations on how long it took the light to get to earth, that they are correct within a factor of ~10 (and this is pessimistic). Worst case, the universe is 1.4 billion years old, not 14 billion years old. Which of course, using my little fingies, is one heck of a lot of a bigger number than ~10,000 years old....
What I should do is just read that poem and put you on pause... ignorant people that want to be ignorant and worse think that it's a virtue to be ignorant, aren't worth listening to. Because if your life is about ignorance and crawling through it with your eyes closed and your hands out praying that you don't bump into something below your hands, or worse, walk into a fire hands first, then life isn't worth living. (which then the socialists answer, "but then, your purpose becomes about sacrificing yourself for your friends and family!")
One thing you should think about: People in the middle ages thought like you do. That's why they were called the dark ages. People in Russia thought like socialists do who answer the stupidity of your base belief system. That's why 50 million of them died for your false ideal. And finally, people still think like you do. Fortunately, people like me exist, who embrace rational thought, who believe that the universe is knowable and that we will inevitably know all there is to know about the universe and reality. Hence why we have cell phones, computers, TVs, indoor plumbing, oh, and actually don't die from everything under the sun....
You know why we moved out of the dark ages into the renaissance? Because a Roman Catholic Priest discovered the original writings of Aristotle back in the 1300s and found them so magnificent that he shared them with his fellows in the Jewish community and the Muslim community. The result was the slow rebirth of humanity from its slow death caused by religion and the destruction of science and its ideals. (This is well documented fact)
Unfortunately for people like me, you use us to perpetuate your lies, and evil. If people like me just stopped and did nothing, you would die as would your evil. But the catch is that all of us have to STOP.
Yes, Ayn Rand, you were so right.
Interestingly, we are sort of stopping. IT isn't for lack of trying, but the world is running out of people like me. You drive us away, and all of our amazing inventions can only make the few remaining so much more productive. Eventually there are too many of you, and not enough of us, no matter how much we try and invent our way out of there being not enough of us. We're starting to get to this point quickly. Every time thieves steal from companies like Microsoft because they think they are "too good" and thus "not fair" to the pathetic companies that have no talent (have you loaded Real Media Player lately? Or Word Perfect Suite?) you take yet another one of us out of the picture. When a society rewards losers ("Swan", "Extreme Makeover Home Edition", "Opra and her cars", "Dr. Phil") you know that the society is in the process of collapsing. (Frank Stronach said basically this, I'm twisting it a little for my own use, but the point is still maintained).
And yes, this all comes from your view Baker....
That's no less pig-headed than any other stolidly unbendable mind in the last 10,000 years that just KNEW that what they KNEW was universal truth. You use, local, subjective truths to disprove other people proposing local, subjective truths.
There is a large difference between the 10,000 years and the assertions of "always true" that you're talking about and scientific fact. The idiots that you're talking about all made assertions based on religion and faith (faith = the voluntary belief in something that is demonstratably false) The problem is that these people's assertions were contradictory the second they said them and if the people at the time had bothered to think about them, they would have realized it, it didn't take some mystical new knowledge that they didn't have access to, to deduce the lie. And going back to my point about destroying false statements and fighting it with everything we have. In fact, in every one of those cases, people DID know that it was BS from day one. They didn't fight for the truth, and the liars won. The Greeks knew that the earth was round and that it orbited the sun. No one fought for it, when the RC church decreed that it was flat and the earth was the center of the universe, because they didn't have the courage and made the false assumption that people would see through the BS. It took a coward that published posthumously, and then one of the greatest men in history, Galileo, to stand up and point out the obvious. And to be clear, the tools were there in Greek times to observe the obvious and point out the lies of the RC church, so your assertions that things change is just bizarre. (aside from my point that you conveniently ignored that if things did change, we wouldn’t have language)
On the other hand, science is non-contradictory and reproducible every time given the same set of variables. This is the definition of scientific method. Thus given the same experiment with the same variables, you will ALWAYS get the same result. Thus it will ALWAYS be true. (And before you argue about this and say it's a false assumption, go read a little about logical proofs and mathematical proofs and educate yourself, because there is no point in me carrying on a conversation when you are arguing in ignorance.)
I can't disprove your faith, but I can laugh at you for denying that it IS faith
There's a reason why you can't disprove it (see definition of faith above for why it isn’t faith), and no one ever has disproved it in the past 50+ years since Ayn Rand first outlined it. There's a reason why no one has ever disproved Aristotle in the past 2000+ years. There's a reason why every time Aristotle thesis are rediscovered, that group of people experience a golden age. (Alexander the Great, Rome pre-Christians, the Renaissance, etc.) It's because it's true, it was true 2000 years ago, it's true today and will always be true. It is non-contradictory and unassailable. Ayn Rand simply took the scientific use and applied it to human life, society and the world around us and using that principle of non-contradiction built a solid foundation for living a TRUE life that is unassailable.
What you're asserting as assumptions, are not assumptions. They are scientific fact, built upon other scientific fact. Not the kind cooked up by PhD candidates cooking studies, the kind that survives all scrutiny for all existence.
Here's a little tidbit for you, that if you did your research you would realise that assumption and education are two different things:
Learning is based on a 4 step process.
Abstraction
Integration
Definition
Assignment (creating a word for the definition or reusing an old one unfortunately)
Our brains then use this information to form a concrete. This concrete becomes the basis for the next abstraction, integration, definition and assignment. Simply because something is a concrete, (i.e. "chair", "table") doesn't mean that it is an assumption that it is a chair. It simply means that we have aggregated the data and the reasons for why a "chair" is a "chair" and accept it at its face, because we understand the basis for it. (many people don't and just assume, but then there are people like me that understand why a chair is a chair, and it's amazing how life becomes very simple when you understand WHY everything is the way it is.) The fact still remains, even if you assume that the people before you were right and a chair is a chair, you can go back through your premise and identify the abstraction, integration, definition and assignment that happened and understand why. However, if every time we wanted to discuss an oak table, we had to go through the process of abstraction, integration, definition and assignment for "oak" and "chair" our brains wouldn't be very useful, and would get over crowded with information and we would not be able to learn more than a few basic concepts. What makes the brain so wonderful (evolution is grand!) is that it allows for the creation of a concrete that stands on it's own so that we can build on those concretes without having to redefine everything every time.
(and in what I just said you will finally understand the statement: “There is no such thing as a contradiction. If you encounter one, check your premises” (Ayn Rand))
Amazing how all of the BS that subjectivists spu is based on ignorance and laziness isn't it? Sad how subjectivism is based on a fundamental lack of understanding of how humans learn isn’t it? The thing that we do every day, for our very survival, and most of the world doesn’t even know HOW they do it. It must be terrifying to drive a car and not know why or how it works. It must be even more terrifying to go through life not knowing anything for sure because your entire life is based on guesses and taking other people’s word for it, because you don’t understand the most basic thing to understand: the process of learning.
