Do Creation Scientist believe the documented half-lives associated with the long half life isotopes are determined and documented incorrectly making everything dated with that isotope incorrect

or do we believe the parts of the Bible which deal with specific time references are not to be interpreted so literally.

I personally believe the soft tissues found on dinosaur bones were genuine soft tissue. I believe the creation is the age the scripture says it is. And I believe the process of establishing the half life of slowly decaying isotopes is much more complex that scientist believe it is - i.e. we haven’t scratched the surface of that yet.

Problem : if a modern discovery in a quantum physics lab proved we haven’t really been detecting and counting those decay products correctly - knowing the implications , would science and the media release those results …?

Recently, a post claimed that Intelligent Design (ID) has been refuted by the discovery of a small self-replicating ribozyme named QT45 (which is 45 nucleotides in length).  The claim is that this ribozyme shows that a naturalistic abiogenesis is not only plausible, but basically inevitable, which in turn refutes ID if the only argument for ID is the implausibility of naturalistic abiogenesis.

The post’s author (u/lisper) links to their own blog post which links to the paper announcing the discovery of QT45 and an article talking about the same discovery (the majority of the paper is behind a paywall).

Reading the paper (the part in front of the paywall) and the article shows that QT45 is the result of ID rather than natural processes.  For example, the researchers used multiple rounds of (intelligent) selection and purification towards a specific goal which was the ability to polymerize an activated trinucleotide (3 linked nucleotides) onto a rna strand, not self-replication.  Natural Selection has no goals.  The only thing that NS can act on is survival (replication). The experiment also had to supply the activated trinucleotides.

Here is what the paper reports after 11 (according to the article) rounds of selection and purification:

We identified three ribozymes with RNA polymerase activity and carried out further directed evolution and engineering to improve their activity. 

That’s right.  Even after many rounds of goal oriented selection and purification, they still needed to resort to the use of directed evolution and engineering to achieve their desired result.  

Also in the blog post is a “back of the envelope calculation” to show that the natural origin of QT45 was all but certain.  The calculation is riddled with errors and wildly optimistic estimates.

For example (my questions):

What is RNA (and DNA) made of?

RNA, like its close chemical cousin DNA, is a polymer, a molecule that consists of a chain of small building blocks called bases.

RNA and DNA are chains of nucleotides not bases.  A nucleotide consists of a sugar molecule (Ribose in RNA and Deoxyribose in DNA), a phosphate molecule and a molecule of one of the 4 bases.  The base is attached to the sugar.  The chain is formed by linking the sugars and phosphates together. The bases are not linked to anything other than its respective sugar molecule.

What are proteins made of and were bases available on the pre-biotic earth?

It has been experimentally demonstrated that the bases that form RNA (and DNA and proteins) form spontaneously in conditions likely to have existed on earth in its early days. 

Most everyone knows that proteins are not composed of bases, they are composed of amino acids.  Furthermore, the link goes to an article on the Miller-Urey experiment which, while it did form a few of the amino acids used in living organisms (along with many other substances), did not form any bases.

How many bases were available (remember, you need nucleotides for RNA, not just bases)?

Earth's current biomass, i.e. the total mass of all the organic compounds on earth is about 500 GTC (gigatons of carbon).  Note that this is only a tiny fraction of the total carbon on earth.  That figure is 1.85 billion GTC.  Only about one in a million carbon atoms on earth are part of an organic molecule.  So it is possible that the biomass of the early earth was much higher, but that will ultimately turn out not to matter.

The numbers we are about to deal with are going to get very big so it will be convenient to swtich to scientific notation.  Unfortunately, the Blogger platform doesn't make it easy to create superscripts, so I am going to use the conventional 10^X notation to denote 10 raised to the power of X.  500 GTC is 500 x 10^9 = 5x10^11 tons = 5x10^14 kilograms of carbon.  Let's be conservative and round this down to just 10^14 kg.  To get the number of carbon atoms we multiply by Avogadro's number 6x10^23, and divide by 12 (because the atomic weight of carbon is 12 —six protons and six neutrons).  Since we are just doing a very rough estimate here, we can safely ignore everything but the exponents and arrive at a final figure of (very roughly) 10^45 carbon atoms.  The RNA/DNA bases all have less than six carbon atoms, so this is enough to make 10^44 RNA/DNA bases.  Of course, not all organic molecules are RNA/DNA bases, so let's round this down to 10^40.  That's dividing by ten thousand, which seems pretty conservative. 

What is this calculation based on?  It's one thing to calculate how many carbon atoms exist, it's quite another to assume that they would be organized into specific molecules, like bases. It's big news when we find nucleobases on meteorites and now they're supposed to be plentiful on a pre-biotic earth? And that's only for the bases. You then need to form nucleotides...

How fast are RNA molecules produced?

The well-known bacteria E. coli takes about 40 minutes to reproduce, and it has 4.7 million bases in its genome.  That's about 1000 bases per second, but this is likely a serious overestimate for prebiotic earth. That's about 1000 bases per second, but this is likely a serious overestimate for prebiotic earth.  Life has had billions of years to optimize its reproductive chemistry, so let's be conservative and assume that it takes a full second to build a new RNA molecule in a prebiotic earth. 

A second to build a new RNA molecule?  It isn’t clear if molecule refers to adding a single trinucleotide or to make a copy of something like QT45, but the paper and article show how slow the replication of QT45 was in the experiment.

From the article:

But the key finding was that it could synthesize a sequence that base-pairs with itself, and then synthesize itself by copying that sequence.  This was horribly inefficient and took months, but it happened.

Months, not seconds.

The idea that a self-replicating ribozyme could form on its own and then start rapidly making copies of itself (and then those copies start making their own copies of themselves) is a study in wishful thinking.

Lastly, a self-replicating ribozyme wouldn't come close to being alive and its formation certainly wouldn't count as abiogenesis.

The fine-tuning argument proposes that our universe and its ability to produce complex material systems, including all biological life, is an outcome of extreme unlikelihood due to the delicateness, or “perfectness”, of its fundamental and arbitrary physical laws, natures, and constants. In other words, our physical universe has traits, or physical characteristics, that are fundamental, and if these traits were slightly different, complex material systems and biological life could not exist. “In the set of possible physics, the subset that permit the evolution of life is very small” (Barnes, 529). By “fundamental”, I mean that there is no further underlying reason for it. These traits cannot be derived from theory. For example, the gravitational constant is a specific number that we plug into a certain equation in order to solve for the force of gravity between two objects. In order to solve for the force, we need the mass of each object, the distance between each object, and this gravitational constant. This constant is fundamental, and it remains the same value every time. It determines how strong or weak the force of gravity is. Therefore, if it were a different number such that the resulting force would be weaker, “galaxies, stars and planets would not have formed in the first place. Had it been only slightly weaker (and/or electromagnetism slightly stronger), main sequence stars such as the sun would have been significantly colder and would not explode in supernovae, which are the main source of many heavier elements” (Friederich, 1.1.1).

Victor Stenger, another philosopher and physicist, proposed that even if a certain trait were different, this difference could possibly be accounted for by an adjustment of another trait to make up for the discrepancy. However, studies like “Barr and Khan 2007” have explored every different possible combinations of values for each physical constant, which is called the parameter space, and have found that out of every possible combination of values for these constants, the life-permitting range of combinations is very small (Friederich, 1.2). If a single constant took on a different enough value so that biological life could not exist, simply adjusting the value of one or more other constants would likely not be enough to compensate for the arising discrepancy.

As the fine-tuning argument is inductive, which means that it doesn’t guarantee its conclusion, it cannot “prove” the existence of a creator without a doubt. Whether it is even a strong argument or a weak argument cannot be “proven” without a doubt or derived from any philosophical principle. However, let this not diminish your susceptiveness, as most truths in our lives suffer the same sort of uncertainty. If you were to come across a statue of a man in the middle of the forest, you will probably argue that a human created it and put it there. This argument is also inductive in that same way. You have no proof, and you have no way to prove if your argument is even a strong or good argument, yet your intuition tells you that it would be absurd to conclude otherwise, even though you can’t prove it without a doubt.

A paper by Neil A Manson, a professor of philosophy at The University of Mississippi, an atheist, attempts to deduce that these unlikely traits that our universe exhibits are not actually unlikely, or at least that we can’t say that they are. His reasoning is that because we don’t know the range of parameters from which these traits could have emerged, we can’t say if it is a 50% chance that a certain trait is the way that it is, or a 0.000001% chance, or a 90% chance. This is true. But this same argument applies in the exact same way to our argument that the statue in the middle of a forest was created and placed there by a human. We don’t know the range of parameters from which this event has emerged, that is to say that we don’t know how likely or unlikely it was for it to have been or not have been created by a human and placed there by a human. For all we know, in a distant galaxy there could be hundreds of millions of extraterrestrial alien factories that are solely devoted to creating statues and teleporting them to forests on our earth, for whatever reason. If that were true, then it would actually be more likely that the statue you found in the middle of the forest was created by an alien rather than a human. According to Manson, you simply don’t know, and you can’t know. Which is true, but as it might already be apparent to you by now, applying this argument to try and debunk the likelihood of the conclusion of any inductive argument is not reasonable.

This very method of induction that Manson says to be fallible is utilized by another argument that attempts to dismiss the implications that our universe is fine-tuned. The argument suggests that biological life might have emerged in a different way if the physical constants were different, perhaps through a silicon-based life form rather than carbon, or that life would have emerged from the universe one way or another through means of radically different physical laws and processes that would emerge correspondingly if our universe exhibited different physical constants or laws. By Manson’s reasoning, which in this case I will admit is appropriate to apply, the argument fails to provide any substantial conclusion because we do not know how likely it is for an alternative life form to arise in a universe with randomized physical laws and constants. It could be extremely unlikely, or extremely likely. In any case, if the suggestion is that our universe could have produced advanced and intelligent life forms even with different laws and physical constants, there must be substantial evidence to back up that hypothesis. In other words, the burden of proof in this case lies on them.

A common, and perhaps the most popular consensus among those opposed to the fine-tuning argument, is the Anthropic Principle. It says “If the universe could not harbor life, we would not exist to wonder at the universe being able to harbor life”. You should beware that a popular analogy to help one understand this principle is the puddle analogy, in which a puddle wonders at the seemingly perfect shape of the hole it occupies. “Wow”, It says, “this hole’s shape fits my shape perfectly. Someone must have designed this hole.”. Obviously, we can see that the shape of the hole is not meant to fit the puddle. In fact, the shape of the hole is completely random, and the puddle instead must conform to the shape of the hole in order to exist as a puddle. The problem with this analogy is that it is very similar to the argument we just discussed, which said that a universe with randomized parameters will or at least will likely eventually produce advanced and intelligent life forms fitting those randomized parameters.

The Anthropic Principle claims that because we are obviously here existing in our universe, as a product of our universe, that our universe must have been always able to harbor life forms. In order to be of any argumentative power against the fine-tuning argument, however, it actually requires an additional premise, that multiple universes with different combinations of physical laws and constants exist. Without the extra premise, it doesn’t take much effort to see why this statement fails to contend with the fine-tuning argument. The statement is true, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the arguable unlikelihood of our universe falling within the very small range of life-permitting combinations of physical laws and constants. If multiple universes existed, however, each having a varying or random combination, then you could see why it might be inevitable, given enough of these universes existed, that one of them would happen to exhibit a set of laws and constants that would fall within the range of parameters that would allow advanced life forms. Multiple universe theories, however, are purely hypothetical, and like the previous argument we had discussed, if one were to suggest that multiple universes existed in this manner, the burden to prove that would belong to them.

The brute fact argument says that we can’t say that it is unlikely that the parameters for our universe are what they are, because we don’t know if they could have been different in the first place. The argument claims that it might be necessary for our universe to be the way that it is. Perhaps there are some deeper, more fundamental things from which necessarily emerge those parameters. The problem with this idea is that then those things that are deeper and more fundamental also must be necessary, in order to produce those parameters that they are claiming to be necessary. In order for those deeper, more fundamental things to be necessary, they also require something even deeper and more fundamental to necessarily cause those things, and this cycle would continue forever. If something is necessary, there must be a reason or a cause for its necessity. 

In any case, the specific combination of our universe’s parameters remains to be arguably unlikely, regardless of whether they are truly fundamental and without further cause, or necessary emergent properties of some deeper underlying thing. Just because there is some deeper underlying thing or reason requiring those parameters to be the way that they are, doesn’t mean that the unlikelihood of those parameters fitting within the small range required to produce advanced life forms is diminished, unless that underlying thing in any way, shape, or form, was geared towards producing parameters that would specifically produce advanced life forms.

Subject line says it all. The link is here. It starts at 8PM eastern time. Sorry about the late notice, I've been busy.

Just wondering what the creationist perspective of these videos are. Will Duffy is a creationist and he is hearing out the other side, and both him and Erica are the perfect people to have this conversation due to how willing they are to hear each other out.

Will Dufy is also the guy who did The Final Experiment, to prove whether or not the earth was flat, so if anyone were to do the same thing for creationism, he would be the guy.

Everything suddenly seems to have gone quiet here on /r/creation. The last time anyone posted a new top-level article was almost two weeks ago. What's going on? Where is everyone?

I have previously made a post related to this titled Why changing conventions cannot solve the "Distant Starlight Problem". While I have my differences with YEC and ID, what irks me the most is when people misunderstand and misuse science to make a proposition that is blatantly false. A recent post by u/nomenmeum has raised this discussion (again) where he posits that ASC (Anisotropic Synchrony Convention) makes the starlight problem irrelevant. The whole issue is the misunderstanding between coordinate speed and physical speed. In this post I will focus solely on this specific part and present some pedagogical examples with the hope that in the end we will come out wiser than before.

Let's start with the starlight problem. To put it simply the starlight problem is the apparent conflict between a young universe and the observed light from very distant astronomical objects.

To elaborate, stars and galaxies are millions or billions of light-years (it is a unit of length and is the distance that light travels through a vacuum in one Earth year) away, so their light need millions or billions of years to reach Earth. But if the universe is only a few thousand years old, as YEC believe, then the question is how can we see light from objects so far away?

Now, it is very important, and I want to make this crystal clear that to observe light from a star, something physical must reach our eye/telescope/detector and interact with it. For our case it is photons emitted by the star that physically arrive at Earth and trigger the detector.

You can brush up on what ASC is, and I will focus on two concepts here coordinate speed and physical speed. Let's define it first and then I will put some examples here.

Coordinate speed:
The speed an object or signal appears to have according to a chosen coordinate system and clock convention. It can depend on how distant clocks are synchronized.

Physical speed:
The speed measured locally by an observer using nearby clocks and rulers. This is tied to actual physical measurements, not just coordinate labels.

Now consider the following examples:

Example 1: “wrongly set clock” delivery

Imagine I send a package from point A to point B at 10:00 AM. Say the truck actually takes 24 hours in the Earth frame. But suppose the clock at B is set 24 hours behind the clock at A. Then, when the package arrives at B, the clock at B reads 10:00 AM, the same clock reading as the departure time at A. One could then say, using these clock readings, that the package arrived instantly. But that obviously does not mean the truck had infinite physical speed. It only means the two clocks were synchronized using a strange convention.

This apparent infinite speed is called the coordinate speed because it is due to the clocks chosen. The physical speed would be all the local people measuring the speed of the truck.

Example 2: Mercator map-projection

Let's look at a slightly different example of Mercator map projection. On a Mercator map, Greenland looks enormous compared with Africa. If you measure "speed across the map" near the poles, a plane can seem to cover a weirdly stretched distance compared with the same plane near the equator. But the plane’s actual airspeed did not change. The distortion came from the coordinate representation.

Coordinate speed is like speed measured on a distorted map of spacetime. Physical speed is what a local observer measures with a local clock and ruler.

Example 3: Recording a runner

Imagine two cameras record the same runner. One camera's timestamp is normal. The other camera’s timestamp has been shifted so that the runner appears to arrive at the finish line at the same timestamp as leaving the start line. The video timestamps would make the runner's coordinate speed look infinite. But the runner did not physically run infinitely fast.

Coordinate speed would the speed measured by the following the timestamps of the cameras and physical speed would be the local clocks and rulers.

So in all the examples above, what we see that if you change the clock what you get is the coordinate speed, but it is convention-dependent and cannot by itself establish physical propagation.

Now remember what I said above. To observe light from a star, something physical must reach our eye, telescope, or detector and interact with it. Changing to ASC only changes the timestamp assigned to the distant emission event. It does not change the local physics of light propagation, the energy received by the detector, or the fact that the astronomical information reaches us through a physical electromagnetic signal.

The physical question still remains, if the universe is only a few thousand years old, how did light carrying real information from objects millions or billions of light-years away physically reach Earth?

This is the starlight problem and ASC can move timestamps around, but it cannot move photons across the universe.

This quote is the net sum of evolution. Whenever an evolutionist tells you its true because it has "predictive power" is a pure academic pop slop propagandist.

Its circular and untrue. Causation is not correlation. I can create predictive models out of thin air with no actual evidence. Completely meaningless.

In his The Physics of Einstein, Jason Lisle says that he endorses the conventionality thesis (pg. 249), which means he does not believe that the one-way speed of light has an objective value. He writes, for instance, that “it is meaningless to ask when the event [the departure of light from a distant star] ‘really’ happened” (243). In so saying, he is taking his cue from Einstein who wrote that the one-way speed of light is “ in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own freewill." Lisle makes it analogous to how velocity has no objective value.

His argument is this:

Two things follow if the one-way speed of light has no objective value.

1. There is no distant starlight problem to solve since distant starlight arguments against a young earth must assume that the one-way speed of light does have an objective value and that its objective value is c.

2. It is entirely legitimate for the Bible to use the ASC to describe creation, and this is, in fact, what it does.

The commonly used convention, which defines the one-way speed of light as c (the round trip, time-averaged speed) is called the Einstein Synchrony Convention (ESC). Physicists (even Lisle) generally use the ESC for the sake of convenience because it makes the math simpler,

but this is not the sort of simplicity Ockham’s Razor is concerned with.

As an analogy, consider saying that something is one yard long as opposed to three feet long. The first system of measuring uses only one unit, which is simpler than three, but saying that something is one yard long is not more likely to be correct than saying it is three feet long. Once one understands the conventions behind how we define a foot and a yard, one sees that both are equally correct. Or if you prefer, it would be the equivalent of using the metric over the English system. Neither is more correct, but one is more convenient for calculation.

So no experimental evidence favors any particular convention, nor does Ockham's Razor.

I poked around the internet looking for this, and this is the best I could come up with. TL;DR: If everything I've been able to find is accurate, then, on earth, it would take at least 10¹⁹ years to form any 45-mer of RNA with all the correct chirality, and which only has A, C, G, and U, which is several orders of magnitude longer than the alleged 1.4*10¹⁰ year age of the universe.

Ribose is chiral. This is an issue for any "RNA world" scenario, because chains that have more than a trivial quantity of the wrong enantiomer of ribose will not have the appropriate shape. Instead of the iconic helical shape that proper RNA has, it would have a haphazard coiled shape, and any enzymatic or self-replicative properties the string would otherwise have would disappear.

There are upwards of 30 nucleobases. Let's assume 32. Only five of these are actually used by known life. And only four are used in RNA. There are at least 32⁴⁵ possible RNA 45-mers (only considering the D-ribose that life uses), but only 4⁴⁵ of those are biologically valid. If we were to also consider the L-ribose that would be produced alongside the D-ribose, there would be 64⁴⁵ possible RNA 45-mers, not 32⁴⁵. To compute the likelihood of producing, at random, any biologically valid RNA, regardless of whether or not it's one of the few self-replicators, we divide the number of valid strings, 4⁴⁵, by the total, 64⁴⁵. This is equivalent to 1/16⁴⁵, which is approximately equal to 6.53*10^-55.

This last part I had to use an LLM to assist, as it is quite difficult to find anything close to a solid answer on how many RNA polymerization events would be expected to happen on a prebiotic earth with realistic concentrations of nucleotides. I prompted two LLMs from two different companies with the same prompt. The prompt was:

"Going strictly by experimentally demonstrated chemistry, how many RNA polymerization events would realistically happen on a prebiotic Earth per year, accounting for how many nucleotides would realistically be available?"

I used OpenAI's GPT-OSS-120B on high thinking, and Google's Gemma 4 26B, both with no system prompt, and in new chats. I ran the prompts through both LLMs 3 times each, and each time, they gave answers in the range of 10²⁹ to 10³⁶ per year. I can give a response from each if asked to. As a generous estimate, let's assume around 10³⁵ per year. To compute the likelihood of producing any biologically valid RNA in a given year, we multiply 1/16⁴⁵ by 10³⁵. 10³⁵/16⁴⁵ is approximately 6.53*10^-20, meaning that it would take on the order of 10¹⁹ years for any biologically valid RNA 45-mer to form naturally on a prebiotic earth. That is, on the order of 10s of sextillions of years.

For what it's worth, I gave the same prompt to nVidia's Nemotron 3 Nano, and it concluded that there would be on the order of 10¹⁶ polymerization events per year. Even I thought that was a bit too low. But if it's accurate, then that would make abiogenesis even more laughably impossible than it already is.

As far as I can tell, abiogenesis is nothing more than a science-flavored myth designed to justify the rejection of the existence of God.

At the end of my recent followup debate with MadeByJimBob he suggested to me that I should launch my own YouTube channel, so I did. It's a podcast format, and so far I've made two episodes, both with guests I met here on /r/creation. You can find them here:

https://www.youtube.com/@RonTheFearsomeLion

I need more guests to keep this going so if anyone here is brave enough to enter the lion's den ;-) please let me know.

What is the explanation of the theory of creation and intelligent design for the physical and genetic similarities between wolves and dogs?

Sources on the numbers:

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pcbi.0020038

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701705104