How anyone can possibly not accept evolution as demonstrated fact completely eludes me. Yes, I understand the reasons that young-earthers, etc, offer for their views, but the question goes to education and such factors as curiosity, objectivity, and decision making processes. This is independent of teleology. Evolution allows for purpose even if it has to be inferred. But this is hardly unscientific, in fact it is unscientific to rule out purpose. Entropy is very real, of course, and it is directional. Evolution itself is directional, from microbes that can only live in microbe communities to clusters of linked microbes, to the first tissues, to the first primitive organisms, to the first multicelluar beings, etc, to mammals and ourselves, with -toward to most recent stages of this movement- greater and greater brain capacity and intelligence. Where did this directionality come from? Nowhere? Ahhh, creation ex nihilo, is that it? Even Atheists can disregard the laws of causality at will? Nothing cannot be the cause of something, in other words, and if there is directionality, then there is a cause of such processes. This Cause does not need to be an anthropomorphic deity pulling strings, it can be a Universal Principle, as in Asian religions, which also gives us polarity, mediation, and adaptation. In any case, how can anyone not have at least some interest in geology and the geologic record? How can anyone, further, write-off centuries of hard science and a multitude of solid discoveries as if all of that could be brushed aside with no second thoughts? I love to study the Bible, it is forever fascinating and I also am at a loss to understand how anyone can not find it an endless source of discovery and inspiration. About which I do understand why some people have that view: The simple-minded way that the Bible has been presented to them in the past, especially childhood and teen years, creating an indelible impression that the whole book is a Potemkin Village, a cardboard version of history, a collection of myths for children, with assorted moral preachments mixed in for effect. But you know what? That kind of outlook is also promoted widely within Christendom and Judaism, as if believers necessarily can only believe and should only believe simplistically, entirely exoterically, as if the Bible is a magical book, free of all error, about history but above all history, and never to be questioned. After all, who questions Grimm's fairy tales? Who questions Little Red Riding Hood, or for that matter, Robin Hood? For me it is the same, to appreciate either the Bible or Geology requires fascination with the subject, requires curiosity especially, and questions such as: How did things get this way? After all, some people see the Grand Canyon and that is pretty much it. "That's nice," or "gee that's beautiful," and there the matter stands and there is no further interest. Can you imagine people who are that dull ? That deaf to curiosity? That insensitive to all the information they might learn from even some basic study of geology? The follow-up question is to observe that some people fail to recognize what an incredible achievement the Bible was / is. As good as the Illiad is, or the Odyssey, or texts from India of great antiquity, there simply is nothing else like it in the ancient world. But you can understand its evolution and through that evolution come to a really deep appreciation of everything that went into the Bible, and believe me, there is zero to find that is in any way Potemkin-like or simple-minded or anything else that people like Joel Osteen find so compelling. In the beginning was the scribal school, followed by collections of clay tablets, followed by editing of sacred stories during the Ur III era especially, followed by a whole history of competing interpretations of stories, modification of stories, royal versions of stories followed by prophetic reinterpretations of the same stories, and on and on. The first "Bible" took shape in Mesopotamia, as the canonical school curriculum in what we would call the "Liberal Arts," with most other scribes mostly working in economic records, property records, records of laws, and all of that. But the Liberal Arts collection of sacred texts was the repository of the nation's collective memory, of its values, and of its identity. Just about this same exact process took place in ancient Israel only by that time scribes were writing on scrolls and not on clay tablets. And creating a portable scroll collection made a major difference in diffusion of ideas and spread of education even if most people remained illiterate. But not as many as before and more and more people could learn to think for themselves. Look at the Bible the way that an historical geologist looks at the Grand Canyon. You can never exhaust the discoveries that are there to be made, but you won't understand any of this if you see the canyon as simply a pile of rocks or the Bible as a collection of children's stories. That level of understanding, in both cases, is pathetic, if you want my humble opinion. The Bible may be "closed canon" now, but until the early centuries AD it was a canon that evolved. It changed from one era to the next, It was modified, added to, subtracted from, reinterpreted, and this went on for a long time, in the process giving us a living history of Israel and large swaths of the Mid East, starting in about 1200 BC with presumably the first written accounts by Hebrews, the first lengthy accounts given poetic style and greater dignity during the monarchy, during which there was the start of the idea of an official canon, followed by the views of the (many) prophets, and then reformers. Into the mix came strict monotheists and promotion of a new narrative about the supposed monotheistic origin of religion, per se, a view which, so far, has little or no support in the archaeological record. Finally the core of the OT was (mostly) finalized by Ezra or scribes under his direction or following his example, which takes us to ca. 400 BC. The complete production anachronistically attributed whole, to Moses. Personally it makes the best sense to me to attribute any number of parts of the Torah / Pentateuch to Moses, whatever his name might have been as known in his era, but the entire production? Not a chance. There are many (many) examples of multiple Biblical authors at a variety of times in the past, like layers of rock in the Grand Canyon. And these layers need to be studied objectively to learn what was really going on and what it all meant at the times things were written. To me there is plenty of opportunity in all of this for Spirit to operate, unseen, making use of ideas of the actors in the story as they came and went, and to act as "divine educator" in the process. And to me this also makes the Bible rich with still other layers of meaning. How can anyone not see all this for what it is? Billy -------------------------------------- Scientific American October 20, 2013 How Science Figured Out the Age of the Earth For centuries scholars sought to determine the earth’s age, but the answer had to wait for careful geologic observation, isotopic analyses of the elements and an understanding of radioactive decay By _Paul S. Braterman_ (http://www.scientificamerican.com/author.cfm?id=4174)
Editor’s note: The following is the introduction to a special e-publication called _Determining the Age of the Earth_ (http://www.sciamdigital.com/index.cfm?fa=Products.ViewIssue&ISSUEID_CHAR=1C1CFC73-1B78-E06C-AED0DC37014CA149 ) (click the link to see a table of contents). Published earlier this year, the collection draws articles from the archives of Scientific American. In the collection, this introduction appears with the title, “Stumbling Toward an Understanding of Geologic Timescales.” Aristotle thought the earth had existed eternally. Roman poet Lucretius, intellectual heir to the Greek atomists, believed its formation must have been relatively recent, given that there were no records going back beyond the Trojan War. The Talmudic rabbis, Martin Luther and others used the biblical account to extrapolate back from known history and came up with rather similar estimates for when the earth came into being. The most famous came in 1654, when Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland offered the date of 4004 B.C. Within decades observation began overtaking such thinking. In the 1660s Nicolas Steno formulated our modern concepts of deposition of horizontal strata. He inferred that where the layers are not horizontal, they must have been tilted since their deposition and noted that different strata contain different kinds of fossil. Robert Hooke, not long after, suggested that the fossil record would form the basis for a chronology that would “far antedate ... even the very pyramids.” The 18th century saw the spread of canal building, which led to the discovery of strata correlated over great distances, and James Hutton’s recognition that unconformities between successive layers implied that deposition had been interrupted by enormously long periods of tilt and erosion. By 1788 Hutton had formulated a theory of cyclic deposition and uplift, with the earth indefinitely old, showing “no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end.” Hutton considered the present to be the key to the past, with geologic processes driven by the same forces as those we can see at work today. This position came to be known as uniformitarianism, but within it we must distinguish between uniformity of natural law (which nearly all of us would accept) and the increasingly questionable assumptions of uniformity of process, uniformity of rate and uniformity of outcome. That is the background to the intellectual drama being played out in this series of papers. It is a drama consisting of a prologue and three acts, complex characters, and no clear heroes or villains. We, of course, know the final outcome, but we should not let that influence our appreciation of the story as it unfolds. Even less should we let that knowledge influence our judgment of the players, acting as they did in their own time, constrained by the concepts and data then available. One outstanding feature of this drama is the role played by those who themselves were not, or not exclusively, geologists. Most notable is William Thomson, ennobled to become Lord Kelvin in 1892, whose theories make up an entire section of this collection. He was one of the dominant physicists of his time, the Age of Steam. His achievements ran from helping formulate the laws of thermodynamics to advising on the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Harlow Shapley, who wrote an article in 1919 on the subject, was an astronomer, responsible for the detection of the redshift in distant nebulae and hence, indirectly, for our present concept of an expanding universe. Florian Cajori, author of the 1908 article “The Age of the Sun and the Earth,” was a historian of science and, especially, of mathematics, and Ray Lankester, whom he quotes, was a zoologist. H. N. Russell, author of the 1921 article on radioactive dating, was familiar to me for his part in developing the Hetzsprung-Russell diagram for stars, but I was surprised to discover that he was also the Russell of Russell-Saunders coupling, important in atomic structure theory. H. S. Shelton was a philosopher of science, critical (as shown in his contribution, the 1915 article “Sea-Salt and Geologic Time” ) of loose thinking and a defender of evolution in debates. The prologue to the drama is the mid-19th century recognition of the relation between heat and other kinds of energy (see the 1857 article “Source of the Sun’s Heat”). The first act consists in a direct attack, led by Lord Kelvin, on the extreme uniformitarianism of those such as Charles Lyell, who regarded the earth as indefinitely old and who, with great foresight (or great naivety, depending on your point of view: see the third installment of the 1900 “The Age of the Earth” article by W. J. Sollas), assumed that physical processes would eventually be discovered to power the great engine of erosion and uplift. The second act of the drama sees a prolonged attempt by a new generation of geologists to estimate the age of the earth from observational evidence, to come up with an answer that would satisfy the demands of newly dominant evolutionary thinking, and to reconcile this answer with the constraints imposed by thermodynamics. The third act sees the entry of a newly discovered set of physical laws—those governing radioactivity. Radioactivity offered not only a resolution to the puzzle of the earth’s energy supply but also a chronology independent of questionable geologic assumptions and a depth of time more than adequate for the processes of evolution. Lord Kelvin and his allies used three kinds of argument. The first of these referred to the rate of heat loss from the earth and the length of time it would have taken to form its solid crust. The second referred to such topics as the detailed shape of the earth (bulging slightly at the equator) and the dynamics of the earth-moon system. The third referred to the heat of the sun, particularly the rate at which such heat is being lost, compared with the total amount of energy initially available. The first argument was completely undermined after taking into account the amount of heat generated by radioactive decay. The second depended on highly dubious theories of formation of the earth and moon and plays relatively little role in this compilation. The third, which by the end was the most acute, presented a problem that outlasted the controversy itself. Thus, when in 1919 Shapley stated that for him the radiometric timescale was fully established, he acknowledged that there was as yet no explanation for the sun’ s energy. (He did not need to wait long. In 1920 Sir Arthur Eddington came up with the answer: the fusion of hydrogen into helium.) In reply to Lord Kelvin’s attacks, the geologists used two principal lines of reasoning. One referred to the depth of the sediments and the time they would have taken to accumulate; the other referred to the salinity of the oceans, compared with the rate at which rivers are supplying them with sodium salts. In hindsight, both theories were deeply misguided, for similar reasons. They assumed that current rates—of sediment deposition and of salt transport by rivers—were the same as historical rates, despite the evidence they had that our own age is one of atypically high geologic activity. Worse, they measured inputs but ignored outputs. The rock cycle, as we now know, is driven by plate tectonics, with sedimentary material vanishing into subduction zones. And the oceans have long since approached something close to a steady state, with chemical sediments removing dissolved minerals as fast as they arrive. Nevertheless, by the late 19th century the geologists included here had reached a consensus for the age of the earth of around 100 million years. Having come that far, they were initially quite reluctant to accept a further expansion of the geologic timescale by a factor of 10 or more. And we should resist the temptation to blame them for their resistance. Radioactivity was poorly understood. Different methods of measurement (such as the decay of uranium to helium versus its decay to lead) sometimes gave discordant values, and almost a decade passed between the first use of radiometric dating and the discovery of isotopes, let alone the working out of the three separate major decay chains in nature. The constancy of radioactive decay rates was regarded as an independent and questionable assumption because it was not known—and could not be known until the development of modern quantum mechanics—that these rates were fixed by the fundamental constants of physics. It was not until 1926, when (under the influence of Arthur Holmes, whose name recurs throughout this story) the National Academy of Sciences adopted the radiometric timescale, that we can regard the controversy as finally resolved. Critical to this resolution were improved methods of dating, which incorporated advances in mass spectrometry, sampling and laser heating. The resulting knowledge has led to the current understanding that the earth is 4.55 billion years old. That takes us to the end of this series of papers but not to the end of the story. As with so many good scientific puzzles, the question of the age of the earth resolves itself on more rigorous examination into distinct components. Do we mean the age of the solar system, or of the earth as a planet within it, or of the earth-moon system, or the time since formation of the earth’s metallic core, or the time since formation of the earliest solid crust? Such questions remain under active investigation, using as clues variations in isotopic distribution, or anomalies in mineral composition, that tell the story of the formation and decay of long-vanished short-lived isotopes. Isotopic ratios between stable isotopes both on the earth and in meteorites are coming under increasingly close scrutiny, to see what they can tell us about the ultimate sources of the very atoms that make up our planet. We can look forward to new answers—and new questions. That’s how science works. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
