Setec

RomeStar, somebody's been feeding you a truckload of bullshit. Those are all standard creationist jokes, and each one is easily disproved in hundreds of ways, if not tens of thousands of ways. Thank goodness I don't have to list them all... since creationists have been trotting out the same old nonsense for so long, somebody put together a nice database of explanations why each claim is wrong.

Age of the Earth
Age of the Universe

Before you consider yourself qualified to contradict the thousands of PhD scientists who use carbon dating, you should really learn how to spell "dating." Learning to spell "billion" would be a plus, too.

However, the basic reason this claim is full of shit is that carbon dating isn't used on things between 100,000 and 2 billion years old. Carbon dating works on most things up to about 50,000 years back, and beyond that a host of different methods are used.

Link: Carbon dating is fine.

No there isn't.

Link: Great flood / Grand Canyon bullshit

Denying evolution is literally every bit as insane as denying gravity. Evolution is not just one idea; it's an entire framework underlying almost everything we know about biology, none of which makes any sense without the context evolution provides. It offers logical explanations for millions of otherwise seemingly random features of organisms. It is impossible to convey the magnitude of the evidence supporting evolution in an entire book, let alone one post.

It's hard to know where to begin with somebody who doesn't believe evolution, because that mindset is so far detached from reality. Not one single person looks at the evidence with an open mind and rejects evolution; instead, people are brainwashed against it by their pastors and then look at evolution with a "where can I convince myself this is wrong" mindset. Usually it's pretty easy -- you run up against something you don't understand and say, "aha! I don't understand that, therefore it must be wrong." Something needs to get you out of that mindset, and reason and evidence won't do it. Maybe a whack on the head with a big stick would work.

I really don't know what will work, but try this: read a few actual science books about evolution. Every time something doesn't make sense to you, it's probably something other creationists have used to oppose evolution, which means you could find it in the Index of Creationists Claims. Use that site as a sort of FAQ to give the basics of things you don't understand. Half of the site involves refuting anti-evolution silliness, but you might need to start with these parts:

• We don't expect to directly observe macroevolution. Then again, we don't directly observe atoms, because they're too small to see. Do you doubt that you're made of atoms?
• We have observed the appearance of new species.
• Here's a nice summary of some of the areas of biology which prove life evolved. None of these take the form of pretty little "x and y, therefore z" proofs because most are entire fields within biology.

No, but you could waste up to 1/7 of your life in church. Since it's the only life you get, that's a lot of time to be tossing in the dumpster.

Besides, punishment has no bearing on what's real or not. If you rationalize you belief on God that way, odds are you realize it's a stupid idea but you're going through the motions so you don't get in trouble. What's the point? Furthermore, what if you've picked the wrong God? Is it really worth believing in one to avoid punishment when it could just as easily be Allah or Zeus or Vishnu waiting to strike you down instead of the Christian God? Or, what if you just believe in a general overall God, but it turns out there's really a sectarian God who sends everyone but Mormons to Hell anyway? You must be scared shitless of all these possibilities unless you're willing to call them all out as bullshit, which is a much better idea.

Then you don't understand them. Science is not a set of ideas for the laymen to be tossed out and judged based on how much they aesthetically please you. Most who don't have several years of good college training in science can't even fathom how much evidence and
reasoning underlies a lot of the basic scientific theories that creationists deny. I grew up loving science and was still completely blown away by just how deep the field of physics is when I had majored in it at a top university for a few years. I ended up switching to bio and was again shocked by just how much evidence there is for evolution..

There are a few reasons scientists have a credibility problem in the public eye, none of which are valid reasons to reject science:

1. Scientists are busy doing science, which is a shitload of hard work. They also have the major headache of getting funding, and many of them teach college classes on top of it all. This means most of them don't have much time to market their ideas to the public. Meanwhile, people on the anti-science side do literally nothing but propaganda.
2. The country may spend a lot on scientific research, but it spends pennies on science education. The National Center for Science Education's budget is dwarfed by that of the Christian-funded Discovery Institute, just one of many propaganda outlets on the full-time attack against science. If you scoot through school like most people do in some cushy major that doesn't involve learning the first thing about science, and your Biblical delusions remain intact, there's pretty much nothing out there after school to prompt you to question your fantasy.
3. Most scientists are cautious and reserved when stating their confidence in things, because they're used to a world of papers filled with error bars and caveats, and most of them are unwilling to say they're 100% positive something is true when that frequent question is asked. They say "no" and the sound bite camera shuts down before they can add, "I'm technically just 99.99999999999999% positive." This technical hang-up leads to the perception that scientists aren't as sure of things as they really are.

Then again, God does have a blog.

__________________
Setec

"No matter what unconscionable thing I do to them, they just thank Me for not doing something even worse." -God

Duhhhhhrrrr Buy My Stupid eBook! <--as seen in Jon's sig!

"Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it." -Mark Twain