• @[email protected]
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    3 hours ago

    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

    • @[email protected]
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      324 minutes ago

      I had a conversation with a woman who strongly believed God put the dinosaur bones there to test our faith.

    • rockerface 🇺🇦
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      62 hours ago

      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

  • @[email protected]
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    443 hours ago

    unfortunately i don’t believe in uranium or numbers higher than 200, so this argument doesn’t work on me

  • @[email protected]
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • nfh
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      525 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        51 hour ago

        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!

    • @[email protected]
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      155 hours ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      85 hours ago

      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.

      • J Lou
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        24 hours ago

        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

        @science_memes

        • @[email protected]
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          43 hours ago

          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.

          • J Lou
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            23 hours ago

            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.

            @science_memes

            • @[email protected]
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              11 hour ago

              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

    • @[email protected]
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      5 hours ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
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    105 hours ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    567 hours ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    327 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      236 hours ago

      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.

      • NostraDavid
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        35 hours ago

        “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

        • @[email protected]
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          34 hours ago

          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!”

      • @[email protected]
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        36 hours ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        16 hours ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      77 hours ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
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        56 hours ago

        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.

  • @[email protected]
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    578 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      226 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        22 hours ago

        Half the earth was actually created in 1969. The other half was finished 12 hours later =]

      • @[email protected]
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        23 hours ago

        The universe was created along with the release os temple os. Everything before are just memories implanted on us.

    • @leftzero
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      96 hours ago

      Earth will be created in 2036. This is just a rehearsal.

    • Match!!
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      36 hours ago

      God created your with your memories as-is this morning when you woke up

    • modifier
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      27 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        35 hours ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 hour ago

        Scientism is not equal to science. Scientism is a way of thinking that’s similar to a religion with saint texts written in physics and biology. It denies religion, while preserving its very structure. The meme is a good example of it.

  • hope
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    10 hours ago

    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.)

    • @[email protected]
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      5 hours ago

      Also this doesn’t say anything about the Earth.

      Plus you can give a liberal reading of the bible to be:

      1. god created the heaven and the earth. God created the heavenly bodies.
      2. God created the sky - earths atmosphere and climate
      3. God separates oceans - creates continental forms, and plant based life
      4. 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.
      5. God creates birds and sea creatures. Maybe birds are dinosaurs.
      6. 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.

      • @[email protected]
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        217 hours ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 hours ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            21 hour ago

            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.

      • Buelldozer
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        117 hours ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 hours ago

          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).

        • @[email protected]
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          26 hours ago

          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.

        • @[email protected]
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          15 hours ago

          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.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 hours ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]
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      107 hours ago

      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.

    • PaintedSnail
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      189 hours ago

      This is why you can never disprove creationism sufficiently to convince a young Earth creationist. The hypothesis is unfalsifiable.

    • @[email protected]
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      26 hours ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      27 hours ago

      Well there’s also no way to disprove that everything was created last Tuesday including the memories of things/events happening before last Tuesday.

      • @[email protected]
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        37 hours ago

        God could have put the fossils there with the right carbon isotopes.

        You can’t use logic to disprove belief in magic.

        • @[email protected]
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          7 hours ago

          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

    • @[email protected]
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      18 hours ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 hours ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          37 hours ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
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            7 hours ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
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              2 hours ago

              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.