Are science and religion incompatible?

Prior to the First council of Nicea (325AD) there was disagreement about the nature of Jesus. For the most part christians after this accepted the Trinity, especially since failing to follow orthodoxy meant persecution. However, even today there are those who identify as christians but are nonetheless Nontrinitarians.

If you read even the newest texts you will see they believe others will become Catholic in the end, not that non-Catholics can be saved outside the Church.

But that is a side issue and not relly important. You have admitted some who call themselves Christian aren't really Christian if they don't accept the trinity. So that divides what you call Christianity in two. By the way, the Jehovah's Witnesses don't accept the divinty of Christ or the trinity, but you say they are Christian.

I searched for "Michael handing Kevn his ass to him on a plate" and I got this thread.

~Ulrika~

some of us have larger hard drives.

Wow, thanks Zuzu, I didn't even know about non-Trinitarians. I would disagree with the article concerning the Unitarian-Universalists though. Their organization no longer refers to itself as Christian. So, I guess the question becomes, are non-Trinitarians Christian or not? Should there be new terms, Nicene and Non-Nicence Christians?

The aids are to my faith in Jesus the Christ. I read many of them in parallel. I read all of them on an ongoing basis.

I need aids because I want to learn about Jesus' history, and what others have thought of those documents (what ideas they formulated, etc.)

No, my faith is not deficient by any means. That is like saying that a scientist that concludes something is deficient because he continues to study on the subject.

As far as cherry picking, did you actually read the post? Besides the 63 Bibles, 18 commentaries, and 10 lexicons, the documents ARE 'literature, stories, and basic information that the bible was founded on' as well as non Christian histories (over 800 of them [that is over 700 of them that are not 'older bibles']).

In my view (and the view of many others, including those that do not draw the same conclusions as I), I am studying both literature AND the Word of God.

Even in your most bitter state I still love you.

I agree with everything you said here. Hence:Are you basing the 'generally fairly accurate' on the fact that the inaccurate readings are thrown out? Again I will say:

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the defining document. It is the official text that defines the teachings of the Church. It says what I said it did.

You are right, I was wrong about the Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't accept the trinity. They are not Christians in the Nicene tradition. They might be Christians in a non-Nicene tradition. I don't know.

You think figuring out what beliefs make one a Christian is difficult? Try defining Buddhism! Christianity is homogenous compared to the Buddhist traditions.

Kurgan,
Even if you could disprove that all the evidence supporting the theories that support the idea that the universe is very, very, old, it wouldn't contribute a gram to support the idea that it is young. Disproving one theory doesn't prove another. Show some evidence that the universe is only a few thousand years old. Real, physical or mathematical evidence.

Opps, I didn't see that UU was included. I atteneded services at a UU church for a while and they certainly don't consider themselves christian today. Although some member may call themselves christains and that would be cool with them too. hehehe

EDIT: I read the articles more carefully this time, I didn't see where they called Unitarians christian. Although it does say that they follow the teachings of Jesus, which is true (in addition to may other religious teachings).

I would simply ammend the definition of christian to "someone who belives that Jesus Christ is God"

At least we can agree Christianity isn't actually a religion, or if it is, it's many religions with many completely different faiths. I agree completely "Christians" are religious. I am religious in the sense of the word as defined here... Religious: Having or showing belief in and reverence for God or a deity.

That definition would exclude many who consider themselves Christian, such as the Jehovah's witnesses and Mormons.

Umm, nope, we aren't agreeing. Christianity is a religion. Religions have denominations, branches, sects, whatever you want to call the subsets. The subsets all have certain things in common that define them as members of the same religion. The word "religious" can have a range of meanings. There are many religious Buddhists who don't believe in or revere a god or deity.

That's because there is no deity in Buddhism.

I'm going to leave it at that. I think we have exhausted this topic and nothing I say will ever change your mind. If you believe Christianity is A religion, then I'll agree to disagree.

I will admit Ulrika that I am not an expert on half-life dating. I will also say that I have read a large amount of literature on the subject, so I am not a complete novice on it. As far as I have read, the oldest dating range for measurable c-12,13,14 is 100,000 years, but most will limit it to either 50-40k years.

Further, the claim that half-life dating is proof positive makes some mighty large claims that decay rates have always remained the same. This is certainly not the case, and we can somewhat make reference to this based on tree rings (but one can debate on the accuracy of those as well...) up to around 4,000 years ago. Beyond that, we are shooting in the dark.

Remember that Libby made this statement: "If one were to imagine that the cosmic radiation had been turned off until a short while ago, the enormous amount of radiocarbon necessary to the equilibrium state would not have been manufactured and the specific radioactivity (SDR) of living matter would be much less than the rate of production (SPR) calculated from the neutron intensity." [Libby, W.F., Radioactive Dating, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1955), page 7]

The Specific Decay Rate (SDR) and the Specific Production Rate (SPR) 'should' be equal if the atmosphere is in 14C equilibrium. However, the reason that Libby said this was that the SPR is 18.8 atoms/gram of total carbon/minute. Where the SDR is only 16.1 disintegrations/gram per minute.

Here are a couple of interesting links on the subject:
Radiocarbon Date calculation
Dating Methods I

Regarding carbon dating:


nope

Do you know how carbon dating works?

In the upper atmosphere Nitrogen (most common isotope N14) interacts with solar and cosmic radiation to produce carbon C14. This happens at a fairly constant rate, although it does vary with solar cycles as well as cycles in the earth's magnetic field. Therefor the amount of C14 in the environment will vary somewhat with time.

Carbon cycles between the enviornment and a living creatures, so that the ratio of C14 to stable carbon is the same as the surrounding enviornment. When the creature dies it is no longer exchaning carbon with the atmosphere and the ratio of C14 to stable carbon isotopes decreases exponentially with a known half life.

Because the C14 ratio in the atmosphere varies with time, accurate estimates require calibration with samples of known age. (For example tree rings (made of dead tissue and aged one ring per year)) as well as items with a know historical providence. And i'm sure other techniques I don't know details about.

The rest is pretty simple math and I'm sure Ulrika could help you with that.

Have calibration curves changed with time? yep! lots of times. The accuracy of the half life of carbon-14 has been improved, Knowlege of the variation with time of the C14 concentration has increased.


As for Radioactive Dating in general, I would advise:
Irradiate your date until he/she glow. You now have a "hot" date. Enjoy!

Christianity is a PLATFORM!

No! its a GAME!

LOL!!!

I am pretty sure by this point I have a good idea of how it works.

Ulrika's math seems to spit in the face of most scientific statements on the age that c14 dating can accurately read to...

This is really where I stand on my argument Zuzu. The thinking that decay rates have always been the same for millennia is a huge assumption...

Bah... I will be back to answer all this later... I have a 10 Day trial to WOW that I am letting go as I sit here and respond to these... See you all in a few days

grrr... yet another update....

Ulrika's math is fine, her assumption that a sample started at 100% C14 is silly.

Decay rates (i.e. the half life) has always been the same. If you have evidence to the contrary, you are going to make big headlines in the physics community. I think what you mean to say is that the source levels vary with time. This is known (although Libby's original work assumed the souce level was constant, IIRC) and this is why there are calibration curves. Yes, the accuracy of the calibration gets worse as you go farther back in time, since we have fewer anchors to base it on. However it is not too difficult to make estimates of the error bars and give confidence intervals.

Yes there is a limit to how far back you can make estimates using carbon dating. Not because the decay rate is variable , but because the amount of C14 left in the sample is too low to count accurately. That's why you use other isotopes to make estimates farther back.

Quoting wikipedia (since we're all so fond of it)


Most of us in the thread are talking aboutthe first part of this. You, on the other hand seem to be speaking of "organized religion".

There's nothing silly about adopting unity for a derivation. Because the final number of atoms scale linearly with the initial atoms, one must simply multiply the final number by that factor. In nature the ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 is 1.3×10^-12. Thus in my analysis assuming a solid block of natural carbon, after 1 million years the number of carbon 14 atoms in the sample would be 3.9x10^12 atoms.

While that number is still mind-bogglingly large, the resulting ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 would be approximately 4x10^-17 which is beyond the sensitivity of most carbon-dating techniques. In order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, like you said Zuzu, one must move to an isotope with a longer half life.

~Ulrika~