I had a delightful conversation with two young Mormon missionaries while I was waiting at the bus stop just the other day. They started the conversation by asking if I had a relationship with Jesus, and I replied that no in fact I am an atheist but would be happy to talk with them. They asked me how I had come to such a position, so I told them my story of growing up in a fundamental church in Kasilof and my experiences in college, mostly though through my anthropology classes...
I started college in Hawaii as a Christian, sent by my best friend's parents to bring him back to god through our friendship and mutual interest in biking. My natural curiosities led me to my first anthropology class which outlined basic techniques for dating as well as detailing known frauds in the anthropological world. By chance a few of these frauds I had heard of, but not as frauds but touted as evidence for the historical accuracy of the bible. From dinosaur footprints next to man's in Texas to giant skeletons, we easily debunked these myths and correctly placed them into the fraud category. I learned dating techniques in this entry level class and later the math and principles behind them. These methods included, and these are off the top of my head, Potassium-Argon dating for igneous and metamorphic rocks, Carbon 14 dating for relatively recent carbon deposits to around 40,000 BCE, Dendrochronology, which in certain areas allows accurate dating of tree rings back to 35,000 BCE, Uranium-Thorium/Protactinium dating, which tracks the rate of decay of Uranium into Thorium or Protactinium depending on how many Neutrons are in the Uranium to start. This dating method is used for limestone deposits, in which Uranium is soluble by water with the Calcium Carbonate, and drips from stalactites down into the stalagmites. The Protactinium and Thorium is left in the ceiling and only Uranium is dripped to the bottom, because there is no Thorium or Protactinium to start with, any found in the stalagmite later is from decay, the center most point at the bottom of a stalagmite is the oldest part and has the most Thorium and Protactinium compared to Uranium. This method measures accurately for things approximately to 700,000 years BCE. Other dating methods include Ice Cores and Varves, Fluvial deposits- which include pollen, seeds and other particles deposited into lakes and rivers, most commonly into deltas for rivers. Chronostratigraphy, Luminescence dating, Obsidian Hydration dating, the final of which measures how much humidity from the atmosphere has penetrated the glass structures of obsidian on the napped edges of the glass. There is a slight color shift you can see through thin sections of the obsidian, the further the penetration, the more time it has been since the obsidian was cut, this is only a general dating method but still very accurate. All of these dating methods I learned and understood in this first year and yet I remained a Christian for a time, operating simply by Pascal's Wager. I was not willing to give up faith quite yet. Eventually however I was able to reconcile these facts with my beliefs after much consideration of the evidence. In retrospect it should have been a very easy decision given the amount of evidence for the truth that these dating methods suggest, that our earth is very, very old indeed. I was taught that the bible is inerrant and that if error could be found within its pages then it should be held as proof that it cannot be the word of god. The physical evidence against the genesis account in the bible was not the only thing that had prompted such a drastic change in my beliefs. Religious people still thrust god into the gaps of scientific knowledge. One of the many problems with this is that religious people do not keep up with the scientific data, they continue to point at 200 year old theories as proof that the science doesn't work, even though those theories have changed and been modified as more precise data has poured in through the centuries. Religious people talk about these old theories frankly because none of them seem to know anything about the new ones. The problem lies in two places when they do this, One, nearly all their straw theories of evolution have long been known as inaccurate and new theories have evolved as more evidence has piled in. Second, they are very simply claiming- you scientists cannot explain x therefore god must have done it. Simply because we cannot explain x does not mean that we never will, it means we haven't yet. The church has been saying the same thing for millenia, we can't explain sickness, therefore it must have a spiritual component, we cant explain mental illness therefore demons must be possessing people, and it goes on to this day, but when germ theory comes along, nobody seems to call these people out and say you have all been wrong, even admittedly wrong on all of these fronts, why should we continue listening?
The why becomes a fight about moral grounding, not about facts of matter. In my conversation with the Mormons, they did exactly this, pointing to the fact that the bible gives them a moral framework from which they live their lives. We are right because the bible says that Jesus was a perfect man and he died for everyone's sins so that we can all go to heaven if we believe that he did it for us. A complete nonsequiter. Moral superiority is great to have but it does not come from Jesus any more than anyone else. It comes from each person and their actions. You cannot claim moral superiority as a group if your members do not act differently than another group. A better function for a groups claim would have to be the mean of the group, but come on, were dealing with people here, not numbers. If, and this is a big if, if god were a real entity that worked in our lives, then we should see the results of real change in the lives of people who join the correct religion. We don't need anecdotes of the biker who drinks a lot and finds Jesus or the prison inmate who now speaks in front of kids, but a real trend toward life change in one religion over another. The fact is that we can find such anecdotes in many religions, people change their lives because they want to belong to something and many things fit the bill. The yearning in a Mormons heart is no more satisfied and no more life changing when he thinks of Jesus than anyone as deeply involved in any other religion. There are no scientific anomalies that show us that religion x makes people behave better than religion y.
Now the other big if, if god does not exist and we are all hurtling through space on our nice bubble of a planet that teams with life, then a simple theory would say that we have each evolved a set of characteristics that give us part of our personalities and predispositions and that our experiences have just as much effect on ourselves and our beliefs as anything else and that we can choose to be good, bad, mean, cruel, helpful or kind. Other people in our lives affect our decisions based on how much we want their affection or how much we get pissed off by someone cutting us off in traffic. Such a model would suggest that people make their won choices and most people, even religious, would probably agree. But god, if he does exist, seems not to play favorites with religions and in no way can we claim that he backs us when in comes to moral superiority.
At this point I let the Mormons talk about the evidence for why the bible offers the real truth. his claim pivoted around the notion that he knows it is true because his prayer and council with god is answered by a thirst for more of god. His reference to this subjective experience was short-lived, and because that was all he had to offer as evidence, I cut in. There is no way to determine how you feel about something measures up to what I feel. Subjective experience cannot be replicated. Claims that can be made without evidence can be dismissed as easily, without evidence. This is beside the point though, what you or I feel about something has no bearing on whether it is true. The truth of a matter is independent of our ideas about it. How often have we lived a dilution only to find we were wrong all along? No matter how we felt while believing wrongly, did it change the truth of the matter? Did it occur to us that our fanatic adherence was anything but normal? Of course not. Our thoughts and feelings do not change matters of fact. The strength of our believe has no bearing on the probability of its accuracy. When the evidence suggest we are wrong, we must skeptically look at that evidence for accuracy, not against our current beliefs, but against the physical world, and then change our minds, admit we were wrong and move on with life.
Now when the conversation turned to evidence, I was a little surprised as they willingly gave ground to the historical inaccuracy of the old testament. Now no fundamental Christian would give up ground here, but Mormons, I found, had no qualms in saying that humans screwed up god's word. They did not agree or disagree with my views on evolution, merely sidestepped the issue. They simply said that it was the message that was important. This is actually a core tenant of the Mormon faith that allows them to make further claims. Every time we screwed up god's word, he had to send another prophet to straighten things out, which brought us all the prophets of the old testament, Jesus, Joseph Smith and every leader of the Mormon church since Joseph Smith. Because they gave ground here, I will have to rant instead about fundamental Christians. Despite all evidence for a very old planet, they hold to a literal six day creation, and only because they believe in a book they claim has no errors. If there were a few verses left out, you know the ones that claim that the whole book is inerrant, then they would be able to say "oh well that's just an allegory for creation," but know those verses are in there, so their stuck. So, despite the evidence, they pick through the facts ignoring most of it to find a few bits that don't fit, for example a snail that has been radiocarbon dated to 1.3 million years old even though it is still alive. This was a problem for scientists at first as this should indicate that dating methods are inaccurate and hardly worth our time. Now I did not discuss C14 dating in great detail before because I intended on doing that now. First I will explain what C14 is and how we get it. Our atmosphere had approx 21% Oxygen, and 70% Nitrogen and some other stuff including C12 which is carbon in its neutral state. Now as the sun's radiation hits our atmosphere, it hits stuff, which is why we don't get radiated down here, and why astronauts wear so much stuff out there. We get C14 when a Neutron from these collisions is absorbed by a Nitrogen molecule. The relative number of C14 in the atmosphere is stable compared to the number of C12 and C13 in the atmosphere. As plants perform photosynthesis they take Carbon 14 and Carbon 12 both into their systems where it becomes part of the plant. Animals too breath it in and eat it which allows it to become part of their bodies. Carbon 14 is an unstable isotope which means that it slowly breaks down into Nitrogen 14. So in a piece of burnt charcoal from a site, C14 is compared to the C12 to find out the time that the piece of wood died. The half life is 5730 years which means that half of the C14 will become N14 over that period. There are many ways to find this out, one is to take core samples of living trees that grow in places that have cold winters and warm summers, so as to maintain a yearly growth pattern, some of these trees, such as the bristle cone pine, many of which are over 5000 years old are living today, and core samples show us that the C14 in the center has decayed predictably along a 5730 year half life. The other dating methods I discussed earlier are cross referenced so thoroughly that there is no question these methods work. So how does a snail get dated to 1.3 million years? A hard question for the fledgling C14 dating method. Well it turns out that C14 is produced in the atmosphere and only in the atmosphere. For C14 to reach say, the bottom of a lake or ocean, there must be upwelling currents that allow molecules to be transported to the top and bottom of the water. This doesn't happen very well though, and so bottom of ocean life cannot be dated accurately using this method and will appear much older than they really are. Current scientists know this and so radiocarbon dating is no longer used to date most animals and plants that live primarily underwater. But, people like Kent Hovind, who touts himself as a science teacher, still uses the million year old living snail as his single example of why radiocarbon dating does not work, despite the volumes of evidence to the contrary that he had to wade through to find the one little gem. Because we can explain why this phenomenon that excludes underwater plants and animals from carbon dating, it means that all our other data is safe. The fact that people Hovind's position ignore or refuse to acknowledge or refute the evidence that points to an old earth shows how fanatic they are. They stand on the sidelines shouting and driving from the back seat without producing any evidence for their own position that the earth is very young. They look at the grand canyon next to the sign that says it was formed from slow erosion over millions of years and proclaim "amazing, god did this in a few days with a flood!" They say this because an old book says there was a flood about 4,000 years ago, a book written on the other side of the world about a group of people who had no idea how large the earth was. The grand canyon is still trickling away as it has for millions of years and bit by bit showing us how absurd that notion is.
Labels: Christians, Fossil Dating, Mormons, science
